I shared one of my quick lessons last week and thought I’d share this one which the older two and I did.
This was primarily aimed at completing one of their Beavers badges but it’s a great lesson to do anyway and opened up a lot of interesting discussions.
There’s a lot you can do with this theme and this is intended only as an introduction to the subject.
Materials & Resources
There’s not a great deal needed for this topic. I printed off some bits from Twinkl that I’ve linked to below and then looked at some YouTube videos of the Paralympians the children chose to learn about in more detail.
- History of the Paralympics powerpoint
- Great British Paralympians factfile
- Paralympians research sheet
- Addition/Subtraction colour by numbers
The Lesson
I started by asking the children if they knew what the Paralympics were. They’d heard of it but weren’t able to really tell me much about it. We then had a read through the PowerPoint (linked above).
We then had a talk about some of the Paralympians that I could name and then had a look at the factfiles. D and E each chose a Paralympian to learn more about. Daniel chose Richard Whitehead and Em chose Tanni Grey-Thompson. They had a read through the information, we watched some YouTube videos of them competing and then they completed the research sheets to submit to their Beaver leaders.
I used the opportunity to do some work with H and we looked at this Paralympics counting sheet and we did the addition sheet together.
To finish off this quick topic, the following evening we all played the roll & colour game. We altered the game slightly to each have a sheet each and to see who could colour most of them in. These sheets are great fun and were a fun game in our family games championship.
Other things to explore
To be honest, the Paralympians is a huge topic, and one that definitely requires more than a morning’s lesson. You could explore where the last Paralympics took place and where the next are due to take place.
You could explore the range of events and consider some of the adaptations that are put in place for competitors. You could of course then research a whole range of things to bring in a bit more awareness around disabilities. Guide Dogs and Hearing Dogs have lots of activities and you could learn a little sign language or even have a go at learning braille.
