In its 173rd year, Grasmere Lakeland Sports and Show has created a new initiative - a Grasmere Sports Education Pack - to connect with the younger generation, its local community and schools county-wide.
Several weeks ahead of its 2025 event, to be held on Sunday August 24, Grasmere Sports has put together what is its first-ever education pack for primary school children.
The new Grasmere Sports education pack covers a wide variety of activities with one common denominator. Each activity links back to Grasmere Lakeland Sports and Show in some way and, in broader terms, the heritage and culture of Cumbria and Cumbrian tradition.
With a host of activities that could be used by teachers across Cumbria and beyond in the forthcoming summer term, the education initiative seeks to connect young minds to an event that has its roots in the Victorian era.
Covering maths, English, art, history, geography and citizenship, and with a large number of suggestions for in-classroom activities, as well as ready-to-use resources, the pack builds on the outreach activity that the Show has engaged in over the past few years.
It does everything from encouraging children to consider the emotions of a competitor to asking them to calculate the areas of different sizes of podium. Teachers could use the transcript of a podcast with the Grasmere Lakeland Sports and Show’s Bellman, and many times fell racing champion Tommy Sedgwick, as a comprehension exercise. They could just as easily allow children to learn about different cultures, studying those of countries that send athletes to the Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling competition at Grasmere each year.
The new Grasmere Lakeland Sports and Show education pack was given an official launch at Grasmere Primary School, when committee representative Sharon Savasi, met headteacher Johanna Goode and pupils, Beatrice, Beth, Robin and Oskar. These pupils got the very first glimpse at the resource and provided suggestions for what to add to the pack in the future.
The Grasmere Sports Education Pack is available as a downloadable asset too and is one that any teacher in the country could utilise.
Grasmere Lakeland Sports and Show Chairman, John Hibbert, says, “Our education pack seeks to engage with primary-school-aged schoolchildren and further build our links with schools in the Grasmere area and wider Cumbria. It is important that we instil a love of Grasmere Sports, its tradition and its values within the younger generation, so our historic show can continue for many decades to come.
“Whilst the Grasmere Sports education pack invites children to reflect on the importance of Grasmere Sports to the local community, we would also ask parents and other adults to do the same. What we stage each year is more than just a show. It is a living representation of life in Cumbria in both the past and the present, with these elements coming together in a 21stcentury melting pot that allows us to blend the best of both worlds.
By supporting traditional sports and rural pastimes and identities, the Show is a means of retaining the strong values of yesteryear and encouraging a higher valuation of our unique rural culture. In this way, we believe attending Grasmere Sports offers enrichment and even a new perspective on how to approach our daily stresses and challenges. If we can convey this to children, and to the parents and grandparents who allow them to experience, in person, what they will be learning about through study, our Show’s future will be all the stronger. A new generation of ambassadors will hopefully emerge.”
Download the Grasmere Sports education pack here, whether you are a teacher or just a parent keen to allow your child to learn more about the themes within the activities.
