Formal homeschooling may be on hold for the duration of the
broadcasted
2006
Winter Olympics, February 10 to February 26, 2006. Homeschoolers
around the world will be cheering on their teams and the known
homeschoolers who are participating. Bode
Miller was homeschooled until 5th grade.
On our Yahoo
Group and on many others, we're talking about how we can
incorporate winter Olympic themes into our studies. Here are
some ideas, and you are welcome to add ideas in the group or
email them to me here.
Geography lessons come to mind most easily. Locate the home
countries of the participants on a globe or world map.
Learn
to use a stop watch, and then time some activity, such as
how fast you can run between two trees. Can you beat your previous
best time? How fast can you make your bed or complete a multiplication
facts table? Have your child first guess how long they think
a task will take and be done in an acceptable fashion. Quality
is more important than speed, but a task not done in time is
also not good.
Learn about the various judging systems. Some sports have
creative elements while others are just based on speed.
Physics plays a big part in Olympic sports. Most of the winter
sports have a lot to do with reducing friction as much as
possible while claiming just enough of an edge so that the athlete
doesn't go crashing down.
Paint poker chips gold, silver and bronze and stack them on
your world map on the winning countries. Graph
the results on graphing
paper.
Find out about the city, Turin,
where the Winter Olympics is being held.
The Olympics this season has gone high tech and personal.
You can get alerted via about the events and their results.
Can you think of other things that happen in your life where
you'd like to be instantly alerted?
Talk to your children about playing fair and how the people
who run the Olympics do their best to see that no
one uses drugs or other unfair means to win. It is not unfair
to be stronger by hard work, but it is unfair if it is done using
steroids. Your children know that you take a stand on this. Steroids
may have their uses to help the elderly be stronger, so in and
by themselves they aren't "bad," only when used to
take unfair advantage. What is done in your household to make
sure chores are "fair?"
If there is snow where you live, great! But when we were growing
up in California, the hills were covered in long grass. So we
would use large pieces of heavy cardboard and bend the grasses
over to make a slope we could sled down. Taking a bar of soap
rubbed over the bottom of our make-shift sled helped reduce friction.
This takes some experimenting to work.
Bulletin
Board
If you are looking for statistics or times, this will be the
place to look.
Chiff Olympics
I don't usually link to directories, but this one has done a
suburb job of focusing in on the interesting sports and people,
I couldn't leave it out.
Kids'
Village
Choose "inglese" if your children speak English. Explain
that is how "English" is said in Italian. The site
is a tad hard to navigate, so you may want to help your children.
Who would think that the content is buried under the "e-motion"
link! Much is still in Italian.
Lexicon
of the Olympic winter games
There are many new vocabulary words to be learned to make watching
the Olympics more interesting. This site doesn't do a good job
of explaining these terms. You'll need to put them into Google
to get definitions.
Physics
and Biomechanics
In the module we will use the sports of luge and figure skating
to teach you four basic mechanical concepts: linear kinematics,
linear dynamics, projectile motion, and conservation of angular
momentum.
Winter Olympics
Theme from EdHelper
Lots of Winter Olympics themed studies here!
Winter Sports
KIDS
Getting Started with snow and ice sports such as ice
hockey, skating, skiing, snowboarding, and sledding.
Winter Unit Study
KIDS
Find out about really cold places, about the science of cold,
fun in the snow, and winter tales.
World Geography
KIDS
Participate actively in geographical quests and meet
kids all over the world.
