With the summer’s international cricket season fast approaching, Durham County Cricket Foundation has been supporting the ECB’s Ashes School Challenge by writing a set of educational activities that support literacy and numeracy skills in schools across the country. The Foundation, here at the club, produced a similar pack of resources for both the 2013 Ashes series and last year’s summer of cricket with India and Sri Lanka touring England. The Ashes School Challenge uses the 2015 Ashes series as the main context for learning, but the ideas are easily transferred into other contests – making it useful for the lead up to Royal London ODI here at the Emirates Durham ICG on 20th June.
Dave Ross, who heads up the Foundation, wrote the activities knowing that learning is enhanced when it is placed in a real context, and the Ashes School Challenge does exactly that. Examples of activities in the pack are writing news reports about the games, analysing run rate graphs, producing comic book stories, planning a tour of the matches and designing a new limited over kit. Local schools have been involved in trialling the activities including Framwellgate School, Durham whose pupils helped to write the activities.
To access the resources visit www.schoolschallenge.ecb.co.uk