A Sporting Chance: Use the Olympics to explore inequality with 9-14 year olds
Overview
Consider what factors might affect a country’s chances of winning a medal or participating in an Olympic sport, such as the resources and training facilities.
Think about how rules make sports fairer and find out more about Rio de Janeiro, the host city of the 2016 Olympics, where inequality is a huge problem.
With separate sessions in maths, geography, PE and English, these resources for 9-14 year olds can be used in both a subject-specific and cross-curricular way. Creative teaching ideas for other areas across the curriculum are also provided.
- Compare numbers of medals and athletes by country and investigate in-country inequality.
- Play a vulnerability game to explore inequalities in people’s lives.
- Use role-play to consider possible reasons for and against hosting the Olympics.
- Play Olympic Trumps to compare development data from different countries.
- Shade in world maps to illustrate the inequalities between countries.
- Consider fairness in sport and wider society.
- Organise a “Fairer Sports Day” in school.
Keywords
- Activities
- Assemblies
- Data visualisation
- Development
- Fairness
- Handling data
- Human rights
- Interpreting data
- Lesson Plans
- Olympic Trumps
- Olympics
- Olympics quiz
- Paralympics
- Presentations
- Role play
- Similarities and differences
- Simulation Games
- Social justice
- Speaking and listening
- Sport
- Vulnerability game
Additional details
Publisher(s)
How to cite this resource
Citation styles vary so we recommend you check what is appropriate for your context. You may choose to cite Oxfam resources as follows:
Author(s)/Editor(s). (Year of publication). Title and sub-title. Place of publication: name of publisher. DOI (where available). URL
Our FAQs page has some examples of this approach.
