Olympics unit

[jsfowler]

I know this is jumping the gun but the winter olympics are this year and I was wondering if anyone was thinking about doing an olympics interdisciplinary unit. I am sure I will so I would like to create a thread where we may share ideas. Right now, you may want to post things you have done in the past and as we move closer (I think it is in August) we can include new activities.

Obviously, the social studies teachers will explore Beijing culture, flags, etc.

For math, I thought about looking at the cost of hosting the olypmics and also maybe doing an olympic village layout and design

For language arts, I would like to research olympic heroes.

For my area of science, I may do the "physics" behind some of the olympic events.

What are some of your ideas?

[busbus]

1. Researched Olympics' history, symbol and winter events,

2. Made dioramas of winter olympic sport scenes,

3. Role-Play using Creative Dramatics,

4. Created book reports on winter olympic personalities,

5. Created "How To" booklets for various winter olympic sports,

6. Maintained a "Current Events" bulletin board on the olympics,

7. Created collages of pictures, captions, etc. from current newspaper articles,

8. Plotted distances from "x" to site of olympics

9. Created brochures and travel logs pertaining to the Olympics' site,

10. Made graphs of the locations of the various events,

11. Used a world map to locate and identify places that hosted the winter olympics during the last "n" years to the present, and

12. Viewed and discussed clips of ongoing competitions.

I taught special education intermediate-age students. Our explorations included a lot of discussion and hands-on. Some of the readings were done in "Read Aloud" and "Shared Reading" formats.

[jsfowler]

Hey, there....just wanted to open this thread back up since it is about to begin. Any new ideas out there? I would like to come up with some prompts for editorials, etc. For example, do you agree that I raq should be banned from the Olympics? Should the US ban the olympics since it is being held in communist China? What sport would you like to see added to the official Olympic games? Does anyone have any other thoughts on some good editorials?

[ms.jodi]

Hello-
My school has a summer component so I did a unit on the Olympics. Yes, the social studies connections were obvious. We also completed a unit on the human body systems that really come into play when competing in physical sports (ie: respiratory, muscles, etc) Also, I had the students write persuasive essay letters to the Olympics Committee attempting to persuade them to adopt a sport into the Olympics not already currently played (ie: bowling, surfing, some did skateboarding, paintball..) These letters turned out to be fantastic. We also read a book called Gold Medal for Weird whic is filled with true, but very strange/funny facts and stories about past Olympics. It was a fun 6 weeks!