Extracurricular activities
Extracurricular activities are sports, hobbies, creative pursuits or community activities that are organised and run on a regular basis. It is important that students take part in extracurricular activities if they can, as they have a number of benefits, including:
- meeting people outside of school who share their interests;
- seeing how community activities are organised (including sports and creative activities);
- experiencing volunteer work (perhaps in a giving or receiving role);
- gaining a sense of belonging to a variety of communities; and
- they are fun! We get to participate in activities that we are very interested in and want to do!
Students have been discussing their extracurricular activities with their classmates. They have also discussed how these activities fit with other demands on their time, like school, homework, and family responsibilities. Your student might share their class discussions with you, especially if they need to find ways of fitting everything into their day!
Life Ed has designed a flyer to assist parents and carers.
Discussion task idea
Students interview family members about their extracurricular participation. This could provide a valuable historical record for your family and lead to some great conversations!
- Students interview as many family members as they can and record the information. This could include parents and carers, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and so on. You could even extend to close family friends or neighbours, depending on how extensive you wish your historical record to be.
- If you are writing down responses, use an Excel spreadsheet to record responses. Then you can keep adding extra people to the right as you conduct more interviews.
- Or, you might choose to use a voice recording app or device. Save these recordings in a way where you can easily see whose recording belongs to whom.
| Questions | Person 1 | Person 2 | Person 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| What extra-curricular activities did you do when you were in primary school? | |||
| What extra-curricular activities did you do when you were in secondary school? | |||
| What extra-curricular activities did you do after leaving school? | |||
| Why did you like these activities? | |||
| If you didn’t do extra-curricular activities, why not? | |||
| If there were no barriers to what you could participate in, what would you have done in your younger days? What about now? |
