Having Fun While Learning With the Winter Olympics

My kids are more enthusiastic about the Winter Olympics than ever before. What is not to love? Extreme sports, athletes pursuing their dream, dedication, inspiration, patriotic spirit....not to mention all the science, geography, culture, language, and math you can sneak in if you are looking for those opportunities!

I wanted to share a few ways to make the Winter Olympics a fun and educational experience....

First, there is a huge list of resources at The Winter Olympics Resource Roundup at The Old Schoolhouse Review Crew's website.

Reading history lessons while keeping an eye on skating and hockey.....

I would like to share two resources we used that have been phenomenal.

First, we did a Winter Olympics Lapbook that I purchased from A Journey Through Learning for $1.00. Yes...a dollar! It has an instant download also, with full color pictures. Kelly (3rd grade) put it together in two days, and we learned a lot about the Olympics through it. It covered the history of the Olympic Games, the current location (so we found out exactly where Sochi is), and then what the different sports are all about. It is making watching events a lot more interesting, since we actually understand what is going on.

Here are some pictures of the assembled lapbook:

The cover: Kelly drew a slopestyle snowboarder performing a trick jump - from Team USA of course!

The history of the Games:

The third folder has a separate mini book for each event, where Kelly can record the medal winners and their countries. An added bonus is that she likes to find out where each of the countries are, so we are covering a lot of Geography 'territory' by doing that. 

This is a picture of a huge wall mural that Laura made, showing all the events and when they are taking place, so we don't miss anything exciting: 

Lastly, there is a really neat website put together by NBC that investigates the science angle of many of the Olympic sports. Laura is studying Physics this year, and found the short videos very informative and relevant to her studies. It is really interesting to see Physics in real life action. It makes learning such a hard subject much more interesting when the student understands its relevancy to real life situations. 

Here is a link to the Science of the Olympic Winter Games where you can find all the videos to watch. I guarantee you will find them fascinating!

Go TEAM USA!!!

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