Yesterday the EAL Summer Challenge learners kicked off the day exploring the stadium here at the Steelbacks. They used prepositions, such as opposite, behind, below, above, to the left, and to the north, to direct their fellow students around the stadium.
Sports captions were the focus of the next activity. The students chose actions shots of sportsmen and placed a caption on the photo using Comic Life. A brief description was produced to sum up the before and after. There were some interesting ideas!
The afternoon was spent with multi-sports coach James playing football. The students learnt to communicate on the field as well as have a good time.
On Monday 24th August, the EAL summer school upped-camp and moved to the Saints study centre at Franklins Gardens stadium for a Robolab session. Pete Austen, study centre manager, ran this session on control technology which involves building lego robot ‘buggies’ and programming them by computer to do various things.
Challenges include getting the buggy to turn 360 degrees and stop, go in a straight line and stop at a specific point, park in a garage and a ‘free-for-all’ race. Students really enjoyed this session and worked together well. They got quite competitive for the grand prix at the end. They also learnt not to give up.
This activity encourages communication, teamwork and co-operation skills. As the group have 6 different languages between them, English is the common language. For this session, students had to learn new vocabulary about the robots.
Today out EAL summer school group interviewed Steelbacks player and previous captain David Sales. They asked him questions about his career, teammates, playing skills, fitness, injuries, ambitions, high and low points and batting scores. Each student thought up their own question too. Questions such as: ‘What football team do you support and why?’, ‘What do you do in your free time?’, ‘What countries have you visited to play cricket?’ and ‘What is your ideal car make?’ This is a great way to improve English speaking, listening and pronunciation skills. Everyone was very confident when asking David questions and showed how good their pronunciation is when reading aloud.
They wrote notes which they then applied to the ‘garageband’ voice recording programme on the applemac laptops. Turning notes into complete sentences can be tricky, especially on the spot, but our group managed it well. Students worked in pairs to record their interview, with one of them being ‘David’ and the other the reporter. They added music and sound effects to create the atmosphere of being in a TV or radio studio. We played these back to the rest of the group and there was much amusement as to the sound editing. The pairs had represented David’s answers accurately.
This morning at the Steelbacks, the EAL Summer School Students took part in activities to help improve their punctuation skills. The youngsters had to run around the Northants County Cricket Club on a punctuation trail looking for various symbols that had been hidden around the stadium.
Lynn then enthusiastically led Punctuation Kung-Fu, this involves doing the actions for each punctuation mark with accompanying actions. Anna then asked students to put these into practise by reading through a cricket text (Chronicle and Echo’s Aussies versus Steelbacks build up) while the group applied their king-fu moves at the appropriate places.
The EAL students then went on to talk about punctuation in a football piece, discussing their choices of where to put various punctuation and why.
Jaimie led a memory game involving playing card orders in teams to finish off the morning.
The afternoon was slightly quieter but still exciting, there theme was match reporting. The students began to compile a match report from a video taken of yesterday afternoon’s football coaching. They watched footage of their games and created sentences describing the action. Sports vocabulary was highlighted and the conventions of commentating thought about. Using a word document, everyone started writing their match report up with accompanying photos. To see their match reports, visit the student’s work page.
The X-Box Challenge was the final activity of the day, each student faced an over from world class X-Box bowler Jaimie. They had to record how many runs they scored in their over and as a group, commented on each batter’s performance. Salma was crowned ‘Man of the Match’ with an impressive 13 runs. Comments such as ‘he made a good run after a difficult start’, ’she improved her run rate with an outstanding hit’ and ’some impressive batting after a reluctant start’ were recorded.
Friday 21st August: Today the students finished their fantasy teams, writing explanations for why they had chosen their players.
After a brief interlude of blow football, we carried on with the English listening, speaking and written work, this time ’sport and the five senses’. The students watched some Ashes cricket footage of batters and bowlers. They had to put themselves them into their shoes and think about what they would see, feel, hear taste and touch. Using powerpoint, the group worked very hard on their sentence structure. To see samples of their work, visit the student’s work page.
The day finished with football, cricket rounders, touch rugby and ‘proper’ cricket with community coach James Mellor. We ignored the rain!
Wednesday was another busy day for the EAL students at the Steelbacks summer school. The day started with a visit to the Club Shop where the students undertook a maths challenge based upon items for sale in the shop. The students took inspiration from the shop visit and came back to the centre to design shop adverts for items that they would sell in a Cricket shop of their own. They looked at persuasive language to help advertise their products and used their artistic skills to produce eye catching posters. To see their work, click here.
In the afternoon the students took part in team games. There was lots of laughter as the girls challenged the boys to a game of gutterball followed by a group game of football rounders.
On Thursday the students started the day with a game of group juggling to get their minds alert and ready for learning. They then learnt about the different pieces of cricket kit paying particular attention to descriptive language used to describe it’s flexibility, safety, materials and construction. Students made notes on the most important aspects of the kit and then used this information to produce posters about the cricket kit equipment using the iWeb application on the Mac computers.
Before lunch the students were given the fun challenge of making a tower using 12 jellybeans and 12 cocktail sticks. They managed to finish the towers before giving in to temptation and eating the jellybeans!
The afternoon saw the students working individually to complete a programme trail. This involved students locating information within a programme and using reading and comprehension skills. They then discussed the answers as a group and shared the information that they had found out. Students then made a start on their fantasy football team. With a budget of £50 million they had to choose their 11 players and give reasons why they thought the players would make a good contribution to the team.
On the second day of summer school, our EAL students worked on their English written and speaking skills. Lynn took them on a stadium tour where they answered questions about the facilities. They used this information to compose a comic strip using applemac programme comiclife. We focused on sentence structure, word order and descriptive language. There were some very creative efforts and as a whole group we talked about English conventions when writing speech.
Later in the day the group looked at some sports poems. They discussed what certain lines meant and dissected English sayings/slang. They wrote their own acrostic poems after mind-mapping sports vocabulary. This really helped as they had plenty of ideas to choose from. Some chose to write their poem around dancing, fighting, football and tennis. They used garageband to record their poems, adding sound effects and music.
Yesterday saw the start of a two week EAL Summer School based at the Steelbacks Study Centre at Northants County Cricket Club. The Summer School is being run in conjunction with the Race Equality Team and gives young people aged between 11 and 15 years old the opportunity to take part in activities to help improve their written and verbal communication.
The young learners arrived motivated and ready for the challenges ahead. The students enjoyed making name badges using the Mac computers, in particular using the iPhoto application to take their photo. They then created a profile of themselves and shared this work with the rest of the group. In pairs, students then researched players from the sporting world and created a player profile with information about their favourite sportsperson.
On Friday 24th July, Mark Foster opened Corby East Midlands International Swimming Pool. Anna attended the official opening at this magnificent new facility. The pool complex is amazing, with huge 50 Olympic sized pool, diving pool, fun pool with crazy slide, cafe, , gym and children’s pool.
Speeches came from Mayor of Corby Councillor Mary Butcher , Leader of Corby Borough Council Pat Fawcett, MP Phil Hope, MP Ben Bradshaw, Secretary of State for Culture and legendary Olympics swimmer Mark Foster. Understandably the people of Corby and Northamptonshire are very proud of this state of the art modern pool. In order to try and increase numbers of people swimming, all under 16s and over 60s have free entry, always! As the pool opened to the public in the afternoon, there were huge crowds of families waiting to give it a try.
Spectators in the gallery were treated to various swimming demonstrations and races including Synchronised swimming, diving, scuba diving and snorkeling, Corby swimming club races and an official timed 50 metres set by Mark. This was all very exciting and it was great to see local children taking part in sporting activities.
Supporter 2 Reporter students Josh and Nicola (Burton Latimer school) attended with Sara Cooke. These are trained reporters who are part of the Diamonds Study Centre’s bank of reporters who will be invoved in 2012 events. Trained as part of national project Radiowaves, they attend various sporting events to practise their media skills. They were lucky enough to grab a few minutes with Mark and ask him some questions. They also roamed about taking voxpops from visitors. To see their finished blog and audio tracks, visit: http://www.radiowaves.co.u/r/hiphoppopotomus/blog
EAL (English as an additional language) pupils from Unity College visited the Steelbacks Study Centre on Monday 13th July for an induction session. They will be attending two weeks of ‘Summer challenge’ in August at the centre to practise their English language skills.
