As the 20th Fifa World Cup kicks off next week, these lesson ideas and resources will help teachers use football to tackle learning across a range of subjects.
Football fever is about to sweep the nation as the 20th Fifa World Cup kicks off on Thursday 12 June. The international spotlight will be on Brazil as 32 countries from around the globe compete for footballing glory.
While PE teachers will be in their natural habitat, it's a topical event that can get young people excited about their learning across the curriculum. So with just over a week to go until the tournament starts, check out our selection of World Cup-themed lesson resources.
The National Literacy Trust has worked with children's football fiction author, Tom Palmer, on a fabulous set of reading resources. These include Foul Play: Brazil, a 26-episode adventure that Palmer will write over the course of the World Cup, responding to events as they happen. The first chapter – the length of a five to 10 minute classroom read – is available now, and a new chapter will be published before 8am every weekday from Wednesday 11 June. The chapters will be accompanied by 26 short writing activities that will be published on the National Literacy Trust website.
Palmer has also written a World Cup themed reading toolkit that encourages young people to read for pleasure. It includes a range of practical ideas and activities, such as creating a reading display in the shape of a goal. Pupils can write book reviews on ball-shaped pieces of paper then place them in the back of the net if they liked the book, on the goal frame if they thought it was okay and high or wide of the goal if they didn't like it. The resource also features a message from Chelsea and England midfielder Frank Lampard.
The World Cup: A Fair Game? is a teaching pack from Oxfam that uses the context of the event to examine inequality between and within the countries in the competition. It's suitable for students aged eight to 14 years old. Students consider questions such as: are all of the countries competing in the World Cup the same? how is inequality an issue in Brazil?; and what are the benefits and disadvantages of hosting the World Cup?
The pack features an introductory presentation, quiz and set of cards that can be used for comparing the incomes and "fairness scores" of different countries. It also includes an English resource and presentation; maths resource and presentation; geography resource and presentation; citizenship resource and presentation; and PE resource and presentation.
Global justice is the theme of this World Cup resource created by Cafod, the official Catholic aid agency for England and Wales. One activity for primary pupils looks at the salaries of different people involved in the football industry, from football stitchers to Premier League players, to question fairness in the sport. Another activity for key stage 3 and 4 students considers how development agencies around the world use football to bring communities together and tackle poverty. Additional resources, including a World Cup assembly, song and poetry activity, are available on the Cafod website.
Pencil Street has created a variety of World Cup activities for primary pupils. These include designing a new flag for a World Cup country, writing a newspaper report about the World Cup and putting the names of the competing countries in alphabetical order. There are football-themed worksheets about addition, subtraction and halving, along with a worksheet of football-themed anagrams.
Find out more about the countries taking part in the World Cup with a set of resources from Primary Leap. These include a country and flag matching activity, a missing vowels worksheet featuring all 32 participating nations, a flag labelling activity, and a word search.
If you want to brighten up your classroom for the World Cup, check out these group signs, display letters and numbers from Twinkl. There are also World Cup-themed number lines, alphabet strips, bookmarks and colouring sheets.
We also have a colourful set of World Cup posters. Created by Teaching Ideas, they feature five interactive questions that could be used for group, paired or independent research including, "What do you know about the history of the World Cup?" and, "Imagine you had tickets to the World Cup, how would you get there? How long would the journey be?"
And finally, we have some World Cup-themed videos your students might enjoy. In the run-up to the tournament, the Guardian will be publishing a series of videos showing classic moments from previous World Cups re-created in Lego. The first is Diego Maradona's 'hand of God' goal for Argentina against England in the 1986 quarter-final. Key moments from the 2014 World Cup will be added throughout the competition. Find the latest news on the World Cup here.
