Bring the spirit of the Paralympics into your classroom with a warm-up quiz and extension activities!
The Olympic games may be over for another four years but the excitement of the Paralympics is just starting! Bring the spirit of the games into your classroom with this sports-themed quiz for intermediate to advanced learners.
You will need access to the Internet, a digital whiteboard, and handheld mobile devices for your students (smartphone or tablets).
Sport vocabulary quiz
Intermediate quiz: Sport quiz by Cambridge University Press
Advanced quiz: Sport quiz by Cambridge Univeristy Press – Advanced
These quizzes use the online quiz software Kahoot. If you’ve not used Kahoot before, it’s really simple:
- Start by loading the main start-up screen on your whiteboard at the front of the class, ensuring it will be visible to everyone in the room. You do this by visiting the above web pages, choosing your quiz options and then pressing the ‘start’ button. This should bring up a game PIN that students will need to enter the quiz.
- As they come into class, ask them to take out their smartphone or tablet and go to kahoot.it, enter the pin showing on the screen at the front of the class, and give themselves a recognisable name.
- Once everyone has successfully joined the quiz, you can then work through it one question at a time, with students having 60 seconds to pick the answer, or 30 seconds on the advanced quiz. As the answers are revealed, your screen will show how many students got it right. You’ll also be able to see a leaderboard for everyone taking part, so you can even award a bronze, silver and gold medal to the winners!
Extension activities
After the fun of the quiz, you could extend the sport theme further by doing a web quest on one Paralympic event and asking students to produce a poster based on what they found out. They could even create their own quiz based on their chosen sport!
Another task to bring out their creativity would be to ask them to invent an Olympic or Paralympic sport and present it to the rest of the class. To do this, you could split them into groups and give each one a different sport apparatus typically used in sport. For example, a ball, racket or net. While developing their sport, make sure they think about how many people would take part, how athletes would win, and any other equipment that would be needed. If there’s time, you could also ask them to write out the rules as part of their presentation!
For more sporting inspiration, check out Natilly Macartney’s ideas and activities for an Olympics-themed class.