As sports day looms and you are faced with motivating non-sporty children, ask the sports-phobics to design programmes. You might just have time to send a word-processed questionnaire home in advance to ask parents what events they would like - a race for younger brothers and sisters, or even a race for mothers and fathers? Parents could be asked for favourite anecdotes from their school sports day for inclusion in the programme.
The Internet makes it easy to glimpse sports days around the world. Try typng “bean bag”, “sack race”, “relay” and “running race” into a couple of search engines and you should find plenty of links to web pages written by children at home and abroad about their school sports day. These can make fascinating reading, especially pages with web addresses that end in “au”, meaning Australia, where sports day is seriously competitive - and doesn’t it show?
Meanwhile, www.sportscore.co.uk offers pupils who are keen on sport a chance to put their school fixtures on the map.