Is Anyone an Olympic Athlete?

When we sat down to plan gymnastics we were uncertain how to go about it.  We had to include a number of different things and none of us were exactly Olympic standard!

I think one of the most difficult things was making sure that the kids knew what we wanted them to do when we couldn’t demonstrate the activity properly ourselves. “Who can do a cartwheel? It looks a bit like this... but better,” was quite a common question in the warm up. This was then followed by a number of boys (usually they are more eager to come forward and show off) doing it just as wrong as we had, but there was usually one person who could do it well and then we could point to them and say “like that, do that.”

In the end we ran an obstacle course that included a forward roll, log roll, back stand, cart wheel and crab walk, as well as some jumping and running etc. It went really well; even when we had to move a couple of lessons inside due to rain we still got a really good response from most of the students.

The highlight will undoubtedly be the one grade 6 boy who when asked if he could do a cartwheel said “No. I can do this though...” and proceeded to take a 20m run up and do a shoulder flip landing perfectly on his feet. I’ve never seen anything quite like it... especially considering we were on a solid concrete playground at the time! Some of these kids are ridiculously talented. It is just so nice to be able to give them an opportunity to show it.

Nick Herrick - Sports Coordinator

Is Anyone an Olympic Athlete?