Published: 20/09/2018 - 10:24
Our Basic Skills students have been taking part in weekly cycling sessions at Herne Hill Velodrome, thanks to funding from Sport England. The sessions were led by Wheels for Wellbeing, a charity specialising in inclusive cycling. The accessible bikes enabled the whole group to take part in cycling, which helped to increase confidence as well as fitness levels.
Our Basic Skills students have used the cycling sessions not only as an opportunity to get fit but also to work towards their City and Guilds Entry 2 qualifications in Mathematics and English. During each session, they used tallying to record how many laps they did and then worked on the data in class to draw up tables and pie charts according to the City and Guilds criteria. They analysed the results and discussed the reasons for any increases and decreases in the laps. This also enabled them to study what factors influenced exercise performance (eg, weather) and gave them an opportunity to improve their reasoning skills. This all contributed to their units on 'Extract and Sort Data' and 'Collect and Represent Information'.
In addition to data collection, one of our Basic Skills students chose to write about the Wheels for Wellbeing sessions as part of the course's Reading and Writing module.
All of these sessions meant our students were able to learn in a really practical and fun way, while getting fit at the same time.
Feedback from both our students included:
Gloria: “Very good and therapeutic, it made me feel better. I haven’t cycled since I was a child. I had a very good exercise session, it made me feel really good.”
Jodie: “It was really good and I really enjoyed it, I want to do it again. It was good exercise. Tiring!”
Georgina: “It was really good, and I was happy to go to it. It made me feel happy, my legs were tired as I went on the scooter and I went round a lot of times.”
Hassan: “It was good, I like to keep fit with cycling and cycle for my muscles. It makes me feel stronger.”
