Make a difference by helping refugee children in Perth. This is a unique sports project where you can coach a wide range of sports to refugee children from war-torn countries. The Refugee Sports Project is a very worthwhile project designed to help disadvantaged refugee children to adjust and settle into their new home.
 

PROJECT OVERVIEW

We work with a variety of schools in Perth that each differ in terms of the ages of the children and their sporting abilities. Your day will usually be made up of a mixture of teaching in class plus the chance to coach children a sport or a number of sports during PE lessons. As the sports lessons won't fill up your time-table, you'll help out with other lessons, too, such as English and helping with reading and writing. The sports that you can usually coach are Football and Cricket.

You’ll have the opportunity to coach a sport, or a number of sports, in the day time during school hours, to children in Primary schools. The ages range from 5 to 10 years-old. The children at the school are young and sport is part time and to a “playground” standard only. These primary schools are IEC (Intensive English Centers) schools and take refugee children from countries such as Afghanistan, Sudan and Somalia. However, the combination of teaching and coaching will give you great diversity on the project.

The sports are generally coached by season, but if you wanted to coach a sport that was not in season, or if you wanted to introduce a new sport to the children, the school would welcome it as long as it was of benefit to the children. Usually, you will be involved in a wide range or specific sporting activities, which will give you a very diverse project. Some of the sports are generally taught by season, but many are taught all year round. You’ll also help with sports lesson plans. The schools usually have excellent facilities.

School lessons last for 40 minutes and the school day runs from around 8:45 - 2:45 pm. You'll spend about 4 to 5 hours a day helping the children at the school.

Teaching: You won't be involved in sports all the time, as the school may assign you to whichever activities are needed most by the children at the time of your project. There is only a modest amount of sports coaching availablel in the schools, so you must be prepared to get involved in all aspects of school work as well, thus you will do a lot of classroom teaching.

When you are working on sports, you will be working as an assistant to the sports teacher during school hours.

Regarding your normal teaching lessons, as well as teaching English, you get involved with teaching a number of other subjects with the children from the IEC centre. The subjects that may be available for you to teach are:

  • Art
  • Maths
  • Music
  • Science
  • Sports

FREE COACHING MANUALS:
As a volunteer sports coach with Travellers, you have access to a large number of coaching manuals for each sport - these manuals have been produced in-house by Travellers and are generally very useful in helping you to plan coaching sessions for your students.

ACCOMMODATION

Your accommodation is located in the CBD (Central Business District) of Perth, Western Australia. Therefore you are very central, close to the main train station and shopping district. You'll live with other Travellers volunteers in a very friendly and relaxing Lodge which is ideal for long-term stays. You may have your own room or you may share a room with other volunteers.