Give your students a shared language for what being a good sport actually looks like with this set of five 8.5"x11" printable posters!
"Be a good sport" is a phrase we use constantly and almost never define.
I ran into that this spring, heading into team and league play with my games units. I could hear myself saying it, and I could see students nodding at it, and I was fairly sure that if I had stopped and asked any one of them what it actually meant, I would have gotten five different answers and a lot of shrugging. You cannot hold students to a standard they cannot picture.
So I went looking for something better than a phrase. I found it in the Multidimensional Sportspersonship Orientations Scale, a framework from sport psychology research that breaks sportspersonship into five distinct dimensions. That was the piece I had been missing. Being a good sport is not one thing that you either have or you don't. It is five different things, and a student can be brilliant at one of them while struggling badly with another.
The work from there was translation. I took each of the five dimensions and rebuilt it in language that makes sense to an elementary student, then gave every poster the same three-part structure: a title students will actually repeat, a promise they make in their own voice, and three keys that spell out what the dimension looks like in action.
Here is the full set:
🔵 Show Up & Level Up. "I promise to show up and give my best." Show Up. Try Hard. Learn From Mistakes.
🟢 Stay Classy, Play Classy. "I promise to be classy, win or lose." Win With Grace. Lose With Grace. Cheer For Good Play.
🟠 Respect The Rules, Respect The Ref. "I promise to play by the rules and trust the call." Know The Rules. Follow The Rules. Accept Decisions.
🟣 Be Fierce, Be Kind. "I promise to compete hard and care about others." Be Kind To Everyone. Play Fair Always. Look Out For Others.
🔴 No Cheats, No Excuses. "I promise to play honestly and own the outcome." No Cheating. No Excuses. No Meltdowns.
The promises are what make this set work. A poster on a wall is a rule someone else wrote. A promise is something a student says in the first person, out loud, before they play, and it gives you something far better to point at when a game gets heated. These hang in my gym throughout our games units, and they are the anchor for every conversation I have with students about competing well.
Happy Teaching!
Invite your students to recommit to how your class shows up together, every single lesson, with this free set of 8.5"x11" printable tap cards!
Help your students see past the scoreboard with this 11″x17″ printable poster on the three wins that are always available to them!
Help your students understand that rules are what make great games possible with the Play By The Rules Poster! This printable poster breaks rules down into four Fs (friendly, flowing, fair, and fun) to give you an anchor for talking about rules with your students.
