Olympic Projects

The Olympics are one of my favorite events, both summer and winter.  Beyond that, it is an event that unites us around the world, and provides a unique learning opportunity that only comes around every 4 years for us educators (unless the summer Olympics are late!).  To celebrate this event, our classes worked with a partner to complete an Olympic Presentation on one country competing in the Winter Olympics.

In the project, students created a presentation containing facts about their country, a graph of the athletes participating in different events, a medal count graph, and mini-biographies on an Olympian.

The BEST part of this project was the enthusiasm my students had for it.  Every day, the students were bursting to share what they had seen in the Olympic broadcasts from the night before.  Some couldn't even wait until school! The weekend after the Opening Ceremonies I started receiving Edmodo messages telling me all they had seen already! On top of our school subjects, they learned so much about sportsmanship along the way - we had such candid discussions of how different athletes reacted to their wins and loses, and how those athletes handled things well or could have handled things better.  Without thinking about the academics of it, our students were writing reports, creating and comparing picture graphs, and studying countries around the world!

To end our project, students presented to the class.  We discussed this presentation skill - that we really shouldn't read right from our pages, and came up with the facts that would be most important to share.  We made a list to display and each group shared just key facts, elaborating when classmates had questions.  We were sad when the Olympics ended!