We have had so much fun with the Olympics this summer. At the end of our geography study, the Olympics have been the perfect way to reinforce a year’s worth of learning. And of course, everyone has such brilliant ideas to offer.
Three resources that I used for our Olympic fun were Opening Ceremony party ideas from London2012.com, Olympic fun pack from WhatsintheBible.com, and Olympic coloring pages from ActivityVillage.com.
For the Opening Ceremony, I had the kids so excited: a runner with a torch and flags from all the countries. I had a coloring page for them to work on when the ceremony got a little slow, and I had pages of flags for them to find and mark as they saw them on the program. Of course, I failed to remember that the Parade of Nations and the torch all took place after the ceremony, and that the ceremony takes FOR-EV-ER to conclude. So, the poor kids had to go to bed before the good stuff, and we had to tivo the rest for another night of fun. But they liked their coloring page anyway.
We continued our fun a couple of days later with some sugar cookies and frosting. The kids got out their passports from our geography study and picked flags to decorate on the cookies. I confess, I did help quite a bit with this project. Mostly, I frosted the flag outlines and let them do the filling in. Any fancy details I also took over. But the kids still loved the project, and it really helped to review our flags.
(I went for simple on this project, so I bought packaged sugar cookie dough and packaged icing. You could definitely save money by making your own, but I wanted the bulk of my time to be spent on icing the flags not baking, at least for this project.)
Then, we finally got to the Parade of Nations. Surprisingly, Oldest didn’t care for marking the flags at all. He took a seat and just watched, helping every now and then, while Middlest absolutely loved the project! She rolled and jumped and scrambled from one page to the next marking off flags with her (can you guess?) pink crayon. I had close to 50 flags printed off, and she found every one of them.
It was definitely a fun kick-start to the events, but just a beginning to all of our Olympic fun.
