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Olympics for Kids – A Lesson Plan (Part 1)

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I realize many of you don't know me, so for those that do, please bare with me.I LOVE the Olympics! It is one of my favorite sporting events to watch.This past year for our homeschool co-op I agreed to teach our Pre-K/K/1st grade class. I decided to take the kids on a trip around the world. We learned about a few countries on each continent. We learned about geography, culture, animals, habitats, landforms, bodies of water and such. When I planned the year, I knew the Olympics were going to be in London this summer. I carefully planned our trip around the world so that we ended in Europe. We studied Greece (the country of origin of the Olympics) and England/Great Britain for our European countries. I also planned that our final class would be on the Olympics. Yeah, like I said, I LOVE the Olympics!

We had sooo much fun at our Olympics class. I wanted to share the lesson with you as I know I have some people that read my blog that also homeschool.

The way I taught the class was to teach a lesson on the Olympics first. Then we had our own mini-Olympics. This was a long class compared to most of our classes. It took 1.5 to 2 hours.

Today I will share with you the first part of my lesson – the class portion of the lesson. Next week, I'll show you our Mini Olympic games.

Olympics Class Lesson

    1. Ancient and Modern Olympics – I used the book The World of Olympics. The first few pages of this book cover this topic.
    2. We looked at a world map on which all the host cities were marked. We talked about which continents had hosted and which had not hosted the Olympics. (Source for this is listed at the bottom of the post.)
    3. Olympic symbols – I used  The World of Olympics again to talk about some of the symbols. We talked about the flame, motto, flag, and medals.
      1. The flame stands for friendship (I made a torch out of construction paper to show them what it might look like)

Pumpkin with the construction paper torch
    1. Motto – Faster, Stronger, Higher
    2. Flag – 5 rings stand for the 5 continents and each country around the world has at least one of the colors on the Olympic flag in its country's flag
    3. Medals – We talked about the placings as well as looked at pictures of the London medals. We also discussed the fact that part of being an Olympic athlete means displaying good sportsmanship regardless of how you place.
  1. Summer sports – I found a website that listed summer Olympics sports past and present. Top End Sports Summer Olympic sports
  2. Winter sports – The same site had winter sports as well. Top End Sports – Winter Olympic sports
  3. I read the book: G is for Gold Medal: An Olympics Alphabet
  4. We made Olympic rings like those on the flag. This was a simple craft. I pre-cut the 2 inch wide strips of the 5 colors of the flags out of construction paper. The kids glued them together. I helped them with stapling the rings together and getting them in the correct order.

Sources:

The Olympic Values Educational Toolkit – This is a 136 page downloadable resource. It has tons of information and activities. A lot of them are geared toward older children than my age group. Page 49 of this book contains the map I used during our lesson. It shows all the host cities.
Olympic Symbols – Brief discussion of all the Olympic symbols.
See you next week for our Mini-Olympic games…it was so much fun! You can read about it here: {Olympics for Kids – A Lesson Plan (Part 2)}.

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  2. This is such a cute idea!! We appreciate you linking up with us!! It’s so fun to see all of the great ideas and recipes!  We hope to see you back again soon!  -The Sisters

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