Run2Rio

Date: 13th Jul 2016 @ 8:23pm

As this was the year of the Rio Olympics someone (who didn't know how far it was!) came up with an initiative for all schools to walk/run from their school to Rio! As usual with these kinds of things, Mrs Smith and I jumped at the challenge and set the classes off in February to run the 9,320Km to that beautiful city.

We worked out that 1 lap of our playground was 100m, that was the easy bit, the hard bit was the fact that each and every child in our school had to run an average of 33 laps per week for us to achieve our goal. We kept a monthly total and this was sent to the Vale Royal School Sports Partnership to record and collate. Each month, we could see how far we had run and we were sent a league table of schools. I am happy to say that we came 1st and 2nd on a couple of occasions so that kept us going.

As July approached, we realised that we still had a very long way to go. All the children and teachers were told in collective worship about our predicament and as you would expect from Over St. John's, they came up trumps! Every playtime, children could be seen running around the playground enmass to get those laps on their record sheets. During the last few weeks, they were running in the morning, at lunchtime and after lunch before they returned to class. Warm ups in football club, sports club and dance club consisted of a quick few laps of the playground. I must admit to being a little cheeky as I also included the sports day runs in our totals!  All of the St. John's staff got involved and were seen running/walking around our playground  with the children enjoying themselves together.

I had booked a celebration 'RIO' day for the 12th July and sometimes I did not think that we would make it. However, on my final countup over last weekend, I was thrilled to see that we had not only got to Rio, but had exceeded our target by 4Km!  Yesterday was a little damp but it did not dampen our spirits and we all had a fantastic day together. The children all got a chance to warm up with some Samba dancing and then take part in various sports consisting of Handball, Archery and Javelin/Shot throwing. Each and every child received a medal for their efforts and as you can see from the pictures we all had a wonderful day.

What else can I say, I am so proud of our magnificent achievement. I would like to say all the staff look much fitter, but I will leave that for you to decide! Thank you St. John's, you are all FANTASTIC!