Winter Olympics 2014

It is time for the Winter Olympics! The is my first time that I will get to celebrate the winter Olympics with my first graders since this is only my second year teaching. I love winter sports so I am taking advantage of this opportunity and combining two of my passions: sports and teaching -- what could be better? The opening ceremonies don't start until February, but I wanted to get a head start and beat all of the other teachers to the library. I found some fun books and even a neat DVD explaining the winter olympics to kiddos. My first graders LOVED it! They most used phrase while watching all of the athletes compete, "Oh, I can do that!" -- let's just say they don't quite understand the level of difficulty of these events :-)

 I then made a graph in the hallway so we can keep track of all of the medals won by our USA athletes for each event. I made multiple copies of gold, silver, and bronze medals (hopefully enough) so we can post them by the correct sport when we medal in an event.

 The first lesson I taught the kids was about the Olympic rings and what they mean. We talked about how each color represents not only an area of land, but also a color on the flags of the participating countries. We made the Olympics rings by ripping apart magazines and gluing the little pieces together to come up with our rings. Yes, the one shown below is a first graders! They can be very creative!

I will post more and we continue our unit on the Olympics. We are currently working on painting the flags of the participating countries and learning a little about the lucky country we picked. The kids favorite country so far: JAMAICA! Why? Because of the colors of the flag :-)