Formal homeschooling may be on hold for the duration of the
broadcasted 2008
Summer Olympics, August 6 to August 24, 2008.
Homeschooler Becca Ward take the Bronze in Saber
USA's Becca Ward reacts after securing the bronze medal against her opponent Russian Sofiya Velikaya in the women's individual saber at the Fencing Ha - Saturday August 9, 01:39 PM.
Homeschoolers around the world will be cheering on their teams and the known
homeschoolers who are participating:
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 a world map.
Here is a map of Beijing which shows where the various Olympic venues are located. Notice how the highways are in concentric circles, meaning one inside another. Can you find a city near where you live that has designed its highway system like that?
Alphabetizing. When held in countries using the Roman Alphabet, Australia enters first. This year countries will be entering according to the number of strokes in the first character of its Chinese name. Try learning to say the names of countries in Chinese as they are introduced.
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 enough to win.
Today, champion athletes are running more than four times farther at speeds of well under five minutes per mile. How has sports medicine and health meant such a great improvement. This site talks about some theories. Talk about how you can apply what you learn from this research to your own lives.
Paint poker chips gold, silver and bronze and stack them on
your world map on the winning countries. Graph
the results on graphing paper. Here is the medal tally.
Find out about the city, Beijing,
where the 2008 Summer Olympics is being held. Learn how to spell it. Beijing has many Sister Cities. Is one near you? Find out if your city has a sister city, and if they have any participants in the Olympics.
Play the Official Mini Olympics Game. Compete against millions of others around the world.
Watch for many symbols as you watch the summer Olympics. How many can you identify? Here's the story of the 5-ring symbol that is the Olympic logo.
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?"
The Olympic Express
An emagazine just for kids. Learn about each Olympic sport. If the font is too small, wait for the pages to fully load, and then hit the +.
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.
Lexicon of the Olympic Summer 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. You could also magnify a page (cmd-+), and figure out how to write sports terms in Chinese. Pool = 游泳池
Summer 2008 Olympics Theme Unit
Lots of Summer Olympics themed studies here!
Summer Olympics 2008 Unit Study
Lapbook Templates submitted by Louise Fadina to Homeschool Share.