Katarina Johnson-Thompson launches rainbow medal competition and new free funetics home school pack for primary school children

Inspiring children to learn and stay active @home

In these unprecedented times we are continuing to support our 185,000 member athletes and runners and affiliated grassroots clubs with our Athletics & Running ror Everyone @home programme aimed at supporting adults to keep active. As part of our planning process for this programme, we have recognised that much of our work with young and emerging athletes can also help parents, carers and teachers who are currently home-schooling primary-school aged children.

As a result, we feel it is our duty to extend our love of, and belief in, the sport of athletics to parents, carers and teachers and are sharing our curriculum-focused resources with our first Home School Pack.  Available to download for free, we have created our Home School Pack as a resource to help primary school aged children learn and stay active at home.

Our Home School Pack is based in part on our new funetics programme, which in turn uses the award-winning framework of our Athletics 365 courses for young athletes. funetics provides fun athletics sessions to help primary school children learn, develop and practice running, jumping and throwing all year round - and reflects the requirements of the National Curriculum Key Stages 1 and 2.

funetics ambassador and World and Commonwealth Games champion Katarina Johnson-Thompson (KJT) is also heading up a competition for children to design a ‘Rainbow Medal’ to recognise the amazing superhero key workers who live amongst us and keep us safe in these challenging times. 

Commenting on the competition, Katarina Johnson-Thompson said: "We’re asking children to use all the colours of the rainbow in their medal design to celebrate all of the amazing, superhero key workers up and down the country. To enter the competition, children -or their parents - can share a picture with England Athletics on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, using the hashtag #BetterTogether, or via email to support@funetics.co.uk. Myself and the funetics team will be picking and rewarding some of the best entries with fun prizes over the next few weeks."

The England Athletics Home School Pack includes:

• Warm up and cool down exercises as well as competition-style activities for children to test themselves.
• Videos from the funetics programme of fun games for children to try.
• Work sheets which can be printed out for children to complete the cross-curricular sections covering literacy, numeracy, science, PE, art and history.
• Activity cards of a range of fun athletics-themed activities such as colouring, word searches and quizzes.
• Fun games (supporting topics in the curriculum) brought to life in video format.
• The history and heroes of the sport plus an explanation of the different types of athletics events.

Katarina Johnson-Thompson adds: "The England Athletics Home School Pack will help parents, carers and teachers home schooling children keep them active and safe at home. Developing fundamental movement skills and confidence will not only help boost children’s activity levels but will also support them in participating in different sports and build core physical life skills for the future."

England Athletics CEO Chris Jones concludes: "We are proud to be able to produce a unique resource which not only teaches the fundamental life skills of running, jumping and throwing but which also gives children the opportunity to practise academic skills using sport as a foundation."