Diss High Sports Leaders visit Sri Lanka - News - South Norfolk SSP

Diss High Sports Leaders visit Sri Lanka

Higher sports leaders travelled out to Sri Lanka to our partner school in Jalthara with equipment and resources to enable the pupils and staff to learn new games and activities.

During the summer term a group of sports leaders spent a day producing a booklet which included warm ups, lesson plans and cool downs for pupils aged 5-8, 8-11, 9-14.

Initially the intention was to take resource booklet and leave it with the school but soon realised that the school would not have a lot of the equipment needed to play some of the games and activities. The leaders then created two kit bags to leave with the school which included footballs, rugby balls, hockey balls, tennis balls, rounders balls and bats, cones, volleyballs, hockey sticks, kwik cricket set, reaction balls, long skipping ropes, individual skipping ropes and a pump!

Danni Strange describes what happened when they arrived at Jalthara School

‘We presented the children with the sports bags and they were all extremely excited and wanted to play straight away, many wanted to play common games such as cricket however we decided it would be best to introduce them to new games. On the first day we did the warm up activity of ‘beans’ and also the agility race of touching the 4 cones and running back. Then, we introduced the basic pass in hockey, we placed emphasis on control, weight transfer, getting low and hand position. Once they had mastered this we introduced a competition which the children enjoyed. However, some of them began to just smack it at each other so we introduced a new rule - you must stop the ball before you hit it! This prevented the game from getting out of hand. We then taught them a basic dribble and then developed this further into reverse stick also. Later we had to entertain a large group of children without the equipment, therefore we played games such as beans, duck duck goose, the hokey cokey and Simon says; both the teachers and children seemed to enjoy these and were excited about using these in the future. On the second day, we introduced the game of rounders and only had to really discuss the batting and the rules as the children had very good throwing due to the cricket. Rounders went down fantastically and many more children began to join as the game progressed. Finally, we taught the younger children skipping songs such as teddy bear, teddy bear.’

 The visit was a huge success for both pupils and staff at Jalthara School as well as the Higher Sports Leaders Danni Strange, Beth Alexander and Louise Bailey.

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