FOOTBALL skills have been used to help Princethorpe College students tackle literacy.
Year 8 pupils at the school have been taking part in the National Literacy Trust’s Skills Academy, a ten-week initiative that uses the excitement of football and freestyle ball tricks to motivate youngsters to improve their literacy skills.
They have increased their enjoyment of reading and developed their comprehension skills including questioning, clarifying, summarising, predicting and inferring, learned new vocabulary and improved their confidence in reading.
As they progressed through the Skills Academy, they also unlocked exclusive video tutorials from top freestyle footballers, teaching ball tricks such as the ‘rocket launcher’.
As a reward, the students put their new football skills into action in a special training session run by Coventry City FC’s Sky Blues in the Community coaches Chloe Debaes and Callum Ingram.
The coaches organised two hours of skills, drills and mini-matches during which pupils practised basic passing, one-twos, stop-and-goes, turning, dummy shots and headers, played mini four-a-side games and finished with relay races. Some even showed off their newly-learned freestyle tricks to the admiring coaches.
College librarian Celia Scott said: “The Skills Academy has really engaged pupils. All of the material is about football and makes interesting reading for pupils.
“Its approach builds confidence by breaking reading into manageable chunks, making it less daunting. We have even welcomed footballs into the library and the pupils have enjoyed learning the freestyle tricks.
“We really appreciate Sky Blues in the Community football coaches coming into school to run this special end-of-programme reward session for us. It helps reinforce the importance of literacy skills.”
Sky Blues in the Community Education Manager Louise Dennis said: “We are delighted to work with Princethorpe College and support their literacy project.
“It was brilliant to see the children having fun learning football skills and to know that football is changing attitudes towards reading, and helping them to develop important literacy skills.”
