I know that over the years there have been discussions about competitive and non competitive sports days. About 10 years ago, the traditional looking sports day disappeared and was replaced with an ‘everyone is a winner’ type of event. I have never been a fan of that approach for a number of reasons:
(a)Life is competitive! We have a duty as educators to help children to understand competition; What is it? What it’s not? How to cope with winning and losing? What to do if things don’t go to plan?
(b)We also believe that its important to teach the children that we are good at something's and perhaps need to practise on other things. Learning these skills is not just to improve sporting performance but also to enable our children to be ready to tackle the world. After all, interviews are competitive, there is competition within jobs, secondary schools and anything we do will have some sort of targets and goals!
(c)There will also be some children, who for them, sport is the thing that they are most good at! It would be wrong of us not to celebrate these children in the same we do in other aspects of school life.
Therefore our sports day has a mixture of competitive and non competitive elements. In most events, children will compete in their house teams and the bronze, silver and gold children will be identified. In Key Stage 2, the afternoon session will finish with some individual competition races which will include heats and finals.
In assemblies, in the lead up to the event, we will continue to discuss our key values with regards to sport. We will be reminding to the children, to encourage each other, to support their team mates, to give everything a go, to not give up and if they fall over to get back up, dust themselves down and keep going. I’ve included a photograph of Derek Redmond, an athlete famous for his perseverance. We will be showing the children a you-tube clip of the 1992 Olympic games 400 metres to the children in assembly.
You tube clip
“When you don't give up, you cannot fail!”
I know not everyone will become Olympians, like Derek Redmond, but we hope that everyone learns to enjoy the challenge of sport whilst learning lots of vital lessons for the future.
Mr Stock
(a)Life is competitive! We have a duty as educators to help children to understand competition; What is it? What it’s not? How to cope with winning and losing? What to do if things don’t go to plan?
(b)We also believe that its important to teach the children that we are good at something's and perhaps need to practise on other things. Learning these skills is not just to improve sporting performance but also to enable our children to be ready to tackle the world. After all, interviews are competitive, there is competition within jobs, secondary schools and anything we do will have some sort of targets and goals!
(c)There will also be some children, who for them, sport is the thing that they are most good at! It would be wrong of us not to celebrate these children in the same we do in other aspects of school life.
Therefore our sports day has a mixture of competitive and non competitive elements. In most events, children will compete in their house teams and the bronze, silver and gold children will be identified. In Key Stage 2, the afternoon session will finish with some individual competition races which will include heats and finals.
In assemblies, in the lead up to the event, we will continue to discuss our key values with regards to sport. We will be reminding to the children, to encourage each other, to support their team mates, to give everything a go, to not give up and if they fall over to get back up, dust themselves down and keep going. I’ve included a photograph of Derek Redmond, an athlete famous for his perseverance. We will be showing the children a you-tube clip of the 1992 Olympic games 400 metres to the children in assembly.
You tube clip
“When you don't give up, you cannot fail!”
I know not everyone will become Olympians, like Derek Redmond, but we hope that everyone learns to enjoy the challenge of sport whilst learning lots of vital lessons for the future.
Mr Stock
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