A Question of Sport

I went to a great event tonight at Heathfield Primary School in Nottingham. I thought I'd share it.

The idea was to recreate the Question of Sport TV show in the classroom. For families.

There were nine men there. Dads, step-dads and grandads. each headed up a team of their kids in a pub quiz style event.

That was what impressed me so much. Getting dads to come to after-school events is not always easy.

The head teacher and another senior teacher led a series of rounds around general knowledge, what happened next and a session where I asked questions about my books. The families accumulated points for getting questions right.

It worked really well. We talked about sport and reading for an hour-and-a-half. Kids working with adults.

Family events like this work so well because they take the idea of talking about reading home with them. And everbody knows that strong readers are mostly inspired by their home experience.

If you want to do a Question of Sport event, here are some ideas:

* invite parents, especially dads, to a sports pub quiz style event

* do it like a pub quiz - and serve beer (to the adults!)

* the picture board round: show pictures of sports people from the cover of their biographies (concealing their names on the cover) - ask them who it is

* what happened next: show sports incidents selected from YouTube, stopping them before a key moment; then ask the audience to guess what happens next

* show sports newspaper headlines with words blacked out - and ask the families to guess the missing words

* read a section from some sports autobiographies and ask the audience to guess who it is by

* add a general knowedge round

* invite an author to come and add to the quiz activity

These are just a few ideas. It worked really well at Heathfield.