KS4 Sports Day
Written by Emma, Eve,
Emilia & Caitlin – Year 8
Today was the Key Stage 4 Sports Day, and during Period 1, we were able to watch a few of the events that were happening. The events they were doing throughout the day were long jump, high jump, shot put, javelin and running. Since there were quite a few students taking part, they were split into groups and moving around the field going from activity to activity. At each station, they were shown skills and given advice from some of the PE teachers. Some students taking part have selected PE for their GCSEs and some are other Year 10 students who wanted to compete in the events but don’t take GCSE PE. We spoke to Mrs. Walton who told us that the GCSE students would have started to look at some of the science and strategy behind how their body moves in each event, which we thought was interesting!
Long jump and high jump are the two jumping events. From the information we gathered and observed from the Year 10’s performance, they had done well this morning! While we were watching them, they were working on their jumps, learning about the science behind the sport and measuring their distance and how far they were jumping from the track to the sand pit. A couple of the people we watched managed to jump really far! The high jump looked like quite a difficult event to master, with different students showing a range of techniques in order to jump over the bar. In one group, we saw that Mr. Fricker started the bar at 1.1m and then raised it to 1.2m. Students had to get over the bar from a one-footed jump instead of a two-footed jump.
One thing that we noticed while watching the javelin is that it was at the back of the field so that nobody would get injured. The javelins have a spike in one end, so it was important that everyone was careful with them. Mr. Martin put cones where the javelin landed and had a tape measure along the grass so that the distance could be measured. We learnt that the throw only counted if the javelin landed spike end in the ground. If it landed flat or tail end in the ground, it would be a disqualified throw. The shot put was the other throwing event which involves throwing a weighted ball as far as you can. Again, the PE teachers were giving advice as to what strategies the students might want to use.
In the middle of the other events was
the running track. The first thing we saw on the field was the 200m race
between 4 Year 10 boys. We could see it was neck and neck between 2 District Champions,
Louie and Jack. The students also took part in 100m sprint and 400m races
throughout the day. All students who took part looked determined to try their
best in the running races, as they did with all the other events.
