A few weeks ago I told you about the extracurricular sport of colorguard. Remember, extracurricular means something that happens outside of, or is not part of, the normal school curriculum. If you are struggling with the word curriculum, it means all the subjects that are taught during a school year.
Today I’ll tell you about another extracurricular sport that is perhaps even more popular and more well-known. That sport is cheerleading. If you don’t already know what cheerleading is, you might be able to guess just by looking at the word itself.
Cheerleading is a compound word made up of the two words “cheer” and “leading.” It is a little confusing because cheerleading can be used as a:
verb –> She is cheerleading.
and as a
noun –> She is going to cheerleading. (here they mean she is going to cheerleading practice)
One of the meanings of “cheer” is to give encouragement to someone or something and “leading” means to go first, act as a guide or to lead by example. Therefore, cheerleading is the process of encouraging others to give encouragement to someone or something.
This work is usually done by a cheerleader, another compound word made up of “cheer” and “leader.”
Cheerleading is usually done at sporting events, so the cheerleaders are encouraging the fans (people watching and supporting the game) to give their encouragement to the team they are supporting.
Phew! That’s a lot of cheering, leading and encouraging. Let’s take a look at a video for an example.
Did you spot the cheerleading? I hope so. However, cheering is not all cheerleaders do. Take a look here:
As you probably noticed, cheerleaders also:
tumble – handsprings, cartwheels, summersaults….all of these things are tumbling or they are also sometimes called gymnastics
dance – well you know what dancing is
perform stunts – that would be all those throws up in the air
It takes a lot of practice and training to be a cheerleader but you can have a little bit of the experience by learning this cheerleading chant:
