Sunday, July 29, 2012

how are you celebrating the Olympics?

I'm a huge fan of the Summer Olympics and knew that getting my kids to watch a lot of it would be a little challenging. When I read an idea in Family Fun to draw countries and keep a poster board to tally the countries medals using quarters, dimes, and pennies I knew we should try it.

On Friday Julianna wrote down the top ten countries in medal standings from the 2008 Olympics.  We took out the United States and chose a country for every person in our family.


  • Julianna - Russia
  • Joshua - Australia
  • Courtney - Germany
  • Jonathan - Japan
  • Whitney - Italy
  • Seth - South Korea
  • Marilyn - France
  • Jack - China

We made flags for the countries and created a simple garland.


We wore our Olympics t-shirts to watch the opening ceremonies.



Julianna couldn't quite stay awake long enough to see the athletes from Russia walk in (but then again, neither could I), but she had fun pointing out some of the other countries we had chosen.


Then we wrote out a dry erase board to keep track of the medals.


Julianna filled it in this morning. We plan on updating this every morning during the Olympics.

She has already memorized quite a few of the flags and can watch the events and easily recognize some of the countries.  Just a minute ago she saw a girl on a bike and said, "There's Nanna's girl!"

At the end I plan on awarding (either Julianna or Joshua, or probably both) the number of quarters, dimes, and pennies that correspond with the number of gold, silver, and bronze medals that their country won.

I'm looking for other suggestions about what we could do to learn about our country.  My mom suggested taking them to World Market to look at some of the things they have there that represent each country.  What else can we do?

I hope that they'll learn a little bit about different countries, our history, the different sports, etc.  I hope that this will help make the Olympics a little more fun for a six year old and a two year old.  I know that doing this will increase their interest in the games.  It already has.  

Go Germany!  Go Team USA!

What are you doing to celebrate the Olympics?

1 comment:

merritt said...

LOVE this idea!! I was about to say that I will do this next year. Um. Whoops. In four years I think I will. Finn will be Julianna's age and it'd be perfect.

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