Music - Whole School Enquiry - Olympic & Paralympic Values

Our whole school Olympic and Paralympic Value enquiry took place across 2 weeks. The focus of the enquiry was on understanding the meaning behind the spirit of the Olympic and Paralympic games. The enquiry started with an Olympic style opening ceremony, where each class was presented with their value out of the 7 values available. Each class had to find out all about their value and create a representation of it through the arts (music, dance, drama, music or literacy) The culmination of the enquiry was a whole school closing ceremony, where each class presented their value visually.

The aim of this enquiry was for children to:

• Understand what the Olympics and Paralympics are as a concept.
• Know what the 3 Olympic and 4 Paralympic values are, with one value being studied in greater depth.
• Explore how the arts can be used as a medium to express meaning.
• Partake in a variety of pair, group and class discussions to unpick the different values and the main value that is being looked at in greater depth.
• Develop a positive attitude towards the universal meaning of the 7 principles and link this to own experience.
• Create a mini class visual production to bring a value to life through the arts.

Reception

Reception investigated the value “Courage” and created their own iMovie to show what they found out about courage. Take a look at the Video below.

Year 2

Year 2 started off our enquiry by considering what they already know about the Olympic and Paralympic games. As the children jotted down their ideas in pairs, it became apparent that the children were very unsure of what the Paralympics were. As a class we focussed on the Paralympics and unpicked what it is, who competes, when it happens and how long it lasts for. I was very impressed at how the children discussed their thoughts and it was great to see them coming up with different ideas.

Next we looked at the idea that there are 3 Olympic values and 4 Paralympic values. The children were challenged to try and decide what they values were in their pairs before they were revealed. Mrs Darby worked with the children to create acrostic poems and the children choose different ways to present their poems. As a class they discussed the word friendship and came up with dramas and words that were associated with it. For their performance Mr Rhodes put together a mash up of different friendship songs and the children used their dramas, poems to add to the performance. The children learnt the words to “Spice Up Your Life”, “Lean on Me” and “Count on Me”, whilst also adding their own actions to each song. Together, all these elements brought friendship to life and during the performance a movie played with images of all of the children across school.