Scotland’s initial fixtures at Euro 2024 all take place during standard term time, so teaching staff will be bracing themselves for a burst of patriotic fervour this June. Thankfully, our group games are all kicking off at 8pm, so there will be no need to claim squatters’ rights in the assembly hall and wheel out the proverbial big telly to watch the match.
However, just because the fixtures don’t take place during the school day, this doesn’t mean we can’t harness the game’s energy and emotion to craft meaningful learning. Here’s a cross-curricular look at how to bring a flavour of the Tartan Army to your classroom this month:
Literacy - reading
If we are serious about improving pupils’ reading abilities, we have to get them to read. It is a simple yet (for some) elusive anecdote.
Perhaps the most accessible form of good quality writing is non-fiction, where we can find decades’ worth of high-quality journalism online, covering every conceivable topic - including Scotland’s participation in Euro 2024.
I would point towards Dani Garavelli’s peerless feature interview with Scotland manager Steve Clarke as an excellent example to share in class, such as the quality of the content and the style. Equip pupils with highlighter pens and talk through how Garavelli uses varied sentence structures, astute metaphors, striking word choices, structure and tone.
We can also set understanding and analysis questions aimed at helping prepare pupils for National 5 and Higher.
Beyond Garavelli, I would also recommend the sportswriting craft of Graham Spiers, Barney Ronay, Marina Hyde and (the Goat) Hugh McIlvanney.
Literacy - writing
Essays about football are commonplace within the writing portfolio component of National 5 and Higher English - often looking at the grotesque wages, the introduction of VAR and the growth of the Saudi Pro League.
Sprinkled in among these, you can also find very engaging personal essays by pupils talking about the favourite games they have attended, the most memorable matches they’ve played in and the legacy a football club can have across generations of a family.
We could use Scotland’s games at Euro 2024 to guide and nurture this theme in written work, perhaps by teaching pupils how to write biographies of Scots sporting heroes, researching their own “Mount Rushmore” line-up of internationalists, or even writing match reports on the games after watching them at home.
The key learning around these activities would once again be focusing on language development. How do we write a compelling introduction? How can we source reliable, valuable information through online research? What techniques can we employ to edit and redraft a piece prior to submission? How can our work stand out from the crowd?
Numeracy
Here is where I, as an English teacher, wander slightly out of position on the pitch.
Football - particularly international fixtures, at this top tier of the game - is now awash with data, statistics and metrics. In the aftermath of games, we are able to see how much possession each team enjoyed, the distance each player ran, what parts of the pitch they occupied most often, and even how many goals each team was expected to score based on the chances they created.
It’s a mind-boggling, data-rich, information dump of percentages, charts, decimal places and other mathematical geekeries. A whole unit of lessons could be taught based on the data produced by a single game.
And that is before we think bigger picture, about the competition as a whole. Euro 2024 numeracy lessons could look at the average ages of the teams’ squads, overall transfer values of players, relative international experience based on caps, stadium capacities, attendances, ticket prices and profits…where was I?
Expressive arts
Nothing beats a big game at Hampden for sheer patriotic visual eye candy, with our flags - the buttery-coloured Lion Rampant, the summer-sky Saltire - swaying in the stands, mingled with splashes of tartan around waists, ginger wigs under bunnets, the deep blue of the classic shirt.
This is the country of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, John Byrne and Peter Howson: art is in our blood. Pupils could learn about our artistic heritage and merge this with Scotland’s Euro 2024 campaign by, perhaps, designing football scarves or flags, taking inspiration from the styles of their favourite artists.
With schools also likely to be hosting sports day around this time, how about indulging in some photography of competitors, sculpting trophies and medals - or perhaps even committing to capturing our beloved leader, “Sir” Steve Clarke, in portraiture.
Alan Gillespie is principal teacher of English at Fernhill School, an independent school near Glasgow. He tweets @afjgillespie
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