Youth & Family Gold Challenge is a new charity challenge, specifically aimed at schools, families, youth groups and 7-15 year olds. It aims to build on the excitement of London 2012 as all of the challengers take on Olympic and Paralympic sports to raise money for charity.

Those taking part can choose from three challenges (5 Sport Challenge, Family Activity Challenge and the 2012km Challenge). By joining the challenges, schools can also win a chance to run 100m in the Olympic Stadium watched by friends, family and a cheering crowd of 20,000!

There are currently over 20,000 registrations on the site and there is currently an incentive where for every 100 registrations, a school will receive 5 places in our Olympic Stadium Parade which will follow the route of the opening ceremony, and include charities, GB Ambassadors and celebrities. Find out more on the official site.

The Rugby World Cup started on 9th September and runs for the next 7 weeks. The event provides lots of opportunities for learning inside and outside of the classroom, so I thought that it might be useful to share some ideas, resources and links:

• The RWC site – The official site has lots of news, photos, videos and statistics about the tournament and is a great source of information. There is also a History section which can be used to learn about the origins of the event, as well as previous tournaments.
• RWC Youtube Channel – The Youtube channel of the RWC has lots of interviews and daily reports about the tournament.
• Ruggerland is a child-friendly site which has rugby-themed games and activities. There are also resources which schools can use.

• Communication4All – Bev Evans has made some resources linked to the Rugby World Cup and she plans to make more in the coming weeks.

• Bev has also written a post on her blog about the event which includes links to lots of great resources.
• The National Literacy Trust has a Rugby World Cup Toolkit which can be downloaded free.
• Purple Mash - The incredibly busy team at Purple Mash have created some ‘apps’ to support learning about the Rugby World Cup in the classroom. These include templates for making rugby reports, magazines and posters.

• Primary Resources have their own section which contains lots of teaching resources linked to the World Cup.
• The TES have also compiled a list of RWC resources.
• The RFU have a set of resources and rules for those who wish to teach Tag Rugby to their pupils.
• This article on Wikipedia gives information about the event, the results and the venues.
• Don’t forget that you can search for all of the rugby resources on lots of popular education sites at Teaching Search. A quick search for ‘rugby’ reveals hundreds of resources!

Are you aware of any other great ideas or resource sites which are linked to this tournament? Let me know in the comments…

Chance to Shine is a national campaign that aims to bring competitive cricket (and its educational benefits) back to schools. The project provides a coaching and competition programme for groups of primary and secondary schools. They also provide equipment, facility development (including playground markings and non-turf pitches) as well as training for teachers and coaches.

The organisers are currently running an exciting competition. To enter, your Key Stage Two pupils have to design a full-page magazine advert to promote the Spirit of Cricket message of ‘Play Hard, Play Fair, Have Fun’.

The winning advert will be reproduced as a full page advert in the ‘All Out Cricket’ magazine this summer. The top four designs will also win a place for twenty of the winning designer’s classmates to play on the outfield at Lord’s during a Test match!

Find out more about the competition at www.chancetoshine.org/competitionsoc.

The BBC have a huge collection of audio resources for primary schools on their School Radio pages. These include:

• Dance and PE Workshops,
• Music activities and audio clips to use in lessons,
• Collective Worship resources,
• History audio clips and more…

www.bbc.co.uk/schoolradio

Accompanying teachers resources are online and many of the audio programmes are available as free podcasts, so you can download and use them in your classrooms straight away!

BT has launched Coaching for Life, a free online programme designed to help parents, grandparents, carers and older siblings improve their coaching skills for 6 – 11 year olds through a series of new children’s games.

The site has variations on popular games online (with downloadable and video instructions) which teachers, parents and carers can use with children to add to their coaching skills. Some of the games include Two Touch Football, Dribble & Score, Up & Down Cones, Dribble Tag, Three against Two and Mini Hockey. It looks like a useful resource for PE teachers and those interested in coaching.

Here is another collection of links to the latest education news stories:

• SATs for 11 year olds have too high a margin of error to be used to compare schools in league tables, according to the NUT and ATL, who have urged the government to scrap the tests for Year 6 pupils. The leader of the NUT has given hints that there could be another boycott of the SATs next year, although more notice would be given this time around.
• Trade Unions were outraged by the £200,000 pay package of a primary headteacher in south London. Michael Gove has written to the School Teachers’ Review Body to say that he wanted no headteacher to earn more than the prime minister. The TES have published a related article which explains that rocketing headteacher salaries are justified by the ‘mammoth pay packets of singers and footballing megastars’.

Image – Decus Et Tutamen

• Michael Gove has also published the Department for Education’s key policy commitments and invited the public to hold them to account on delivery.
• The chairman of Ofsted has explained that it is not ‘an absolute disaster’ if schools contain bad teachers.
• The scrapping of school building plans has cost education authorities at least £160m, according to the Local Government Association.
• Empty shops could be converted into schools, saving a third of the cost of starting a new building. Meanwhile, a report from the Auditor General for Wales has said that that school buildings in Wales are in a poor state and there is a long way to go before all of them will be ‘fit for purpose’.
• Reforms that will allow every school to become an academy will be rushed through at a pace usually reserved for emergencies such as anti-terror legislation. However, the Director of Education at Civitas has explained that academies are failing to teach traditional subjects in favour of less challenging qualifications in an effort to drive up results.
• Students will have to pay more for university, possibly through a graduate tax, according to the Business Secretary Vince Cable. University students will also be able to take low-cost two-year degree courses in order to save time and money before entering the world of work.
• Thousands of people could miss out on a university place in the UK this year after 660,953 people applied to start full-time undergraduate courses. The Lecturers Union fears that up to 170,000 people could be disappointed.

Image – Graduation Cake Guy

• The debate about school lunches continues as the chairman of the School Food Trust has criticised parents for filling children’s packed lunches with junk food.
• A Scottish government pledge that all school children receive two hours of physical education a week is not being met, according to new figures.
• A group of primary school children have been honoured by the Royal Society of Chemistry for disproving the theory that spiders are afraid of conkers.
• Do you want to get your children more interested in Maths? Why not find out more about the maths buskers who want to communicate the wonder of maths to people in the street!

ICT Goodies is a free resources sharing community setup and run by teachers. The creator of the site, Andrew Clarke, strongly believes in a culture of sharing good practice. He says:

“If I’ve created some great resources that the kids have enjoyed working with and have clearly made good progress, why would I want to keep them to myself? There are too many teachers out there who have a futile stance about keeping their resources to themselves; yes, you’ve spent lots of time making that PowerPoint, so why not let somebody else get some use out of it?”

www.ictgoodies.com

The site does require you to register, but this is free and easy. Why not sign up and share some of your resources? You can also visit other sites in the ‘Goodies’ franchise… Media Studies Goodies, PE Goodies and Business Goodies.

 The World Cup has now started and lots of schools are using the event as a starting point for their lessons. Here are links to a selection of my favourite World Cup resource sites:

• Teaching Ideas – This is my own collection of lesson ideas, resources, display material, videos, links and more, which also includes lots of contributions from other teachers. This page is currently the most popular one on Teaching Ideas!

• Primary Resources – As always, Primary Resources, offers a huge collection of wonderful resources for you to explore.
• Communication4All – Bev Evans makes amazing Powerpoint presentations and display resources and she freely shares them on her website. This is well worth a look!
• TES – Lots of teachers contribute to the resource library at TES Connect, making it a great place to search if you’re looking for World Cup resources.
• Literacy Trust – Download lots of free World Cup resources from the Literacy Trust. You can also read a new chapter of a football story each day.
• International Education Sunderland – Clare Seccombe has produced this amazing site which has loads of freely downloadable content to use in your classroom. Thanks Clare!
• BBC – The BBC have lots of World Cup resources, including football training videos, class video clips about children in South Africa and an interactive wall chart and team tracker.

These are the sites that I will be using most over the coming weeks. What are your favourite World Cup resource sites?

QuadKids is a new athletics concept designed to give more children the opportunity to participate in and enjoy the benefits of track & field athletics and also to identify the stars of tomorrow. The scheme aims to be inclusive, competitive, quick, fun and simple to run. It is a team based quadrathlon competition where each athlete does a sprint, a middle distance run, a long jump and a throw, and it is primarily targeted at pupils aged between 7 and 13.

Finally Gordon Brown has done something that I think is good – he has said that competitive sports will become the norm in all schools again.  He said:

“We want to encourage competitive sports in schools, not the ‘medals for all’ culture we have seen in previous years. It was wrong because it doesn’t work. In sport you get better by challenging yourself against other people. A lot of sports are team games where people have to work together but they play against other teams.”

He also said in an attempt to encourage more girls to take up sport, female Olympic stars, including Dame Kelly Holmes, Christine Ohuruogu, Rebecca Adlington, Victoria Pendleton and Beth Tweddle, would head up a new taskforce promoting sport to girls.

He announced that plans are also under way for a new website for school sports where teams will be able to compare their performance in nationwide league tables – is this instead of the SATs league tables?