How to draw action football players.

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Teachers Notes

Start by drawing
matchstick men



Task 1

Football was described by Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, as ‘the child of the railways, free Saturday afternoons and the popular press’. Explain to the class the meaning of this quotation and how it related to the social history of his time.


Task 2

Read to the class “Broadcasting the Match of the Year” extract from the Radio Times of 15 April 1927. Explain the significance of those words and phrases which may not be familiar to the children, for example:

  • red-letter day
  • Lands End to John O’Groats
  • football history is made

Encourage discussion about:

  • What is history?
  • How is it made?
  • Todays newspapers are tomorrow’s history books?

Matchstick player - heading


Task 3

Because of the limitations of early photography some newspapers employed artists to produce line drawings of their impressions of events during a game. Allow the class to try this technique for themselves by perhaps watching another class play football and at the same time sketching an event of their own choosing.


Practice beforehand drawing quickly matchstick people in action. Stress the proportions of the body and limb movements.


Allow time afterwards to turn the sketches into finished pictures and to add appropriate, headlines, match reports and captions. Eventually compile a set of back pages (sports pages) for display in the classroom.


Task 4

Ask children who own cassette recorders to bring them to school and arrange for ‘radio reports’ to be recorded during a games lesson.


Perhaps some could report on netball, rounders, or other team games as well as football.


Play the recordings to the class and allow the commentators to assess their own performance and describe their difficulties.
Matchstick player - throw in


Task 5

Stage a TV interview in the classroom based on any game in a games lesson.


You will need a presenter, two personalities to add comments and give opinions, a player to interview after the match and a manager to summarise the play.


Allow time for adequate preparation before and after ?the match?.


Encourage the ‘actors’ to assess their performances and describe their difficulties
Matchstick player - 'keepy uppy'


Group Project - Task 6

Task 6:1

Start a class collection of newspapers. Ask the children to bring as many different kinds as they can.

This might be a good time for a small group of children, on behalf of the class, to find out from the local newsagent how many different papers he has for sale and if possible their order of popularity.

Ensure the children understand the difference between:

  • national, local and free newspapers
  • daily and weekly; for example Saturday sports papers
  • a tabloid and a broadsheet

Sort the papers into their various categories, eg


national/daily, local/daily, free/daily,

national/weekly, local/weekly, free/weekly

Use the newspapers and the chart to help the children to understand the terminology so that they can talk with confidence about layout.
Matchstick player - dribbling


Task 6:2 Newspaper mastheads

The children could cut out the masthead from the front page of each different type of newspaper in the collection. Display these in the classroom. A note must be made of the number of pages in each of the newspapers used
for this experiment.

NextNewspaper headlines

  • cut out all the articles, photographs and tables on sport making a careful note of the paper from which they came.
  • highlight the words in the articles they do not understand then make a list of them.
  • the children should look up in a dictionary the meaning of the words they highlighted and listed.

Display the clippings under the name of the masthead of the newspaper from which they were taken

.

When you are happy with your 'matchstick' footballers, you can kit them out in some of your favourite teams' colours .

favouri

Task 6:3

From the display select two popular newspapers such as The Mirror, The Star or The Sun
and two quality newspapers such as the Telegraph, The Independent or The Guardian together with a local daily and Saturday sports newspaper and compare the following:

  • The size of the splash
  • The number of words used in the headlines
  • The number of sub-headings
  • The length of the articles which follow
  • Length of sentences and difficulty of words
  • The number of cross-heads
  • The number of pictures
  • The length of the captions

Write a few sentences to explain the differences and why some of the newspapers are called popular and some are called quality.

Task 6:4

Using the same newspapers compare:

  • The amount of coverage your team has in the national papers
  • The amount of coverage other teams have in the national papers
  • The amount of coverage your team has in the local papers
  • The amount of coverage other teams have in the local papers
  • Write a few sentences to explain these differences

Task 6:5

Use the newspapers in the class collection to estimate, on a page and part page basis, the following:

  • How much of the whole newspaper was used to report sport?
  • How much of the sport was football?
  • How much of the football was match reports and results?
  • How much of the football was concerned with happenings off the field of play, i.e. transfers, players, managers, chairmen?


Do not forget to include headlines, photographs and tables.


Write a few sentences to explain why some newspapers give more and others give less space to reporting football. Choose your favourite newspaper and say how you would change the proportions of sports reporting if you were the editor. You could increase or decrease the coverage but you must have a good reason for your decision.