Extreme Sports



Every course I've taught that has been directed at teens always, almost without fail, includes a lesson or two on Extreme Sports.

Seeing one such lesson appear on my schedule recently, I decided to pull my usual trick of coming up with an exciting PPT and associated activities!

I started off with an equivalent of the worksheet. Students can fill in the names of the sports using one word from the first line of text and one from the second line (the reasoning for this will come into play for the final activity).

Once they had completed this I went through the PPT and elicited the names of the extreme sports. This not only acted as feedback for the previous activity (allowing me to check they were correct in their answers) but it also acted as a consolidation exercise, giving the SS further confirmation of and exposure to the TL. As you will see, I went into some detail when it comes to jumping and diving. This is partly because they are actually very similar and partly because their are different types of diving talked about, that vary quite a lot.

Finishing this I moved on to simple class questions such as "who would try ... ?", "would you want to ... ?" etc. This prompted a class discussion on preferences and the dangers of each sport.

I then moved on to a simple ranking activity. Splitting the SS into pairs, or teams depending on the size of the class, I had them decide on the Top 5 Most Fun and Top 5 Most Dangerous of all the sports. Each team/pair had to agree on each ranking fully before presenting to the class. This is a great excuse to slide comparatives and superlatives into the lesson (giving the class yet more practice).

Finally I had them look once again at the two lines of text from the worksheet and mix them up to come up with their own, unique and scarcely dangerous, Extreme sports. There was lots of discussion about what to put and what to do but they eventually came up with a sport. In the instructions I asked them to think about how you do the sport and what you would need to participate. It didn't need much introduction but the SS loved the chance to be creative and show their worryingly crazy sides!


(For the worksheets, print the last two slides.)