Working with the topic ‘Anything is Possible’ and looking at Olympians in upper KS2 the teacher decided to use the marathon as a stimulus, to fit with wider themes of perseverance and determination.
The teacher worked with the children on the qualities required by marathon runners and showed children a montage of images from the London Marathon. These were used to illustrate the emotional and physical journey that runners go through and students worked on collecting words and phrases linked to this.
Students went on to use these images to create movements in pairs which they then teach to another pair to create a routine linked by different movements.
From this, the children developed the dances using under, over or through, as if someone had fallen in front of them. Some developed their dance to support others.
Children were then tasked with writing a poem. They started by creating word banks together and we looked at different parts of the race and the emotions connected to them. Children were able to use their experiences of the dance day to help them relive and recreate the marathon journey. The fact that the children had been physical for a whole morning helped them to engage with the emotions and fatigue that the race would involve.
The children’s vocabulary easily flowed this time and high-quality description was used. There were plenty of similes, metaphors and personification being used. Some of the children needed help with the structure of the poem but they were enthusiastic and wanted to write.
Good for: Descriptive writing, empathy, first-person narratives, recount