The skipping festival is fun, energetic and very exciting. Working alongside the Skipping School team, pupils are invited to show off their skipping skills in the mass arena of the John Spence sports hall.
After an initial class session within all the feeder schools by Skipping Schools, Mr Pilkington then works with both Year 3 and 4 classes to enhance their skipping abilities.
The ‘skipping bug’ hits North Shields for the half term build up to the competition and the playgrounds are bustling with young people individual skipping and attempting long rope sequences.
Each class from Year 3 and 4 in every school train hard over the six week period working on selecting their best skippers for 4 individual events, 2 paired events and 2 long rope events. All the scores are added together to produce the winning team! The winning team will progress into the North Tyneside Championships in the Summer term.
The final part of the event allows schools to perform their Skip Dance routine. Movement, timing and skill are essential to master the skip dance which is performed to a track of their choice. Pupils work hard with teachers to practice and rehearse this part of the competition and the results are phenomenal.
All equipment will be provided for this fun, action packed afternoon – a real highlight of the year!
Results
Pupils from all of our five feeder schools took part in the annual Year 3 skipping festival on the afternoon of Tuesday 27th March 2018. Over 200 pupils were supported in the event by their class teachers and volunteer parent helpers. The expertise came from 14 of our Dance Academy pupils who helped lead the event. After 6 weeks of support in their own schools by Mr Pilkington, all teams were fully trained and ready to go!
The festival was split into various parts. Individual skipping was followed by paired and team skips which eventually lead onto some skip dance routines created by the schools class teacher. John Spence leaders had spent around 3 hours training for the event and did an excellent job in organising, counting, demonstrating and rope turning. The events success was down to these talented young leaders.
The first events were all based on individual skills. They differed in difficulty and pupils had to skip for 45 seconds for each round of skills. This was followed by 3 different paired skills, which pupils used communication and timing to complete as many rope turns as possible, again in 45 seconds. Finally, two group skip challenges were completed for 1 minute. A team of 5 took part in ‘Run, Jump, Out’ and a team of 10 worked through the ‘Keep the Pot Boiling’ Event. All the events scores were collated and a team total was worked out. Look out for the results on this page!
The last part of the festival was dedicated to each schools Skip Dance routine. 5 carefully selected tracks of music were supported expertly by various skipping techniques, movements and choreography! The displays were a dedication to the practice and hard work the pupils and teacher had put into practicing for the performance. In a true ‘Strictly’ style judging, our very own leaders marked each routine with 10’s galore!
The event was truly a skipping spectacular with one pupil labelling it as “The best day of his life!”