Olympic Winter Home School

We've been trying something new this week in our home school--a unit study of the Olympic Winter Games. I'm usually a text book kind of gal, so this is a big departure from the norm for me. But so far we are enjoying ourselves and learning a lot! Of course it doesn't hurt that this particular unit study has given us the opportunity to watch as much of the Olympics as we possibly can AND be able to count it as school! Woo hoo!


Joshua updating our medals board. The flags represent the countries the boys have studied so far, and the United States. We started with Greece since it's the birthplace of the Olympics, then Canada because they are the host country. The others seem to be added randomly.




The unit study is a pdf file I bought from currclick.com . It outlines what to study each day and covers many subject areas. I'm modifying it quite a bit for our use, since I wanted to use it in addition to our own curriculum. (Remember, I have to have my text books!) We're basically doing math, grammar, Latin, and piano as usual, then replacing our history, science, and writing time with the Olympics unit study. Each day the boys are learning about a country participating in the Olympics, learning the history, rules, and terminology of 1 or 2 of the sports being televised that day, using the dictionary to define related words, etc. It has been so much more interesting to watch the events after studying their histories and learning the rules and terminology of the sport. The official NBC Olympics web site has a decent amount of information about each sport. If there are some you enjoy watching but are curious about how they are scored, etc., I'd suggest you go check it out!


Jonathan reading about Sweden on the National Geographic Kids web site. The boys have enjoyed being able to use the computer for research! We haven't really done much of that in our school yet, but I intend to do more of this.




Our favorites so far? Well, Joshua says he has enjoyed curling the most, Jonathan has enjoyed hockey, and Jordan snowboarding halfpipe. My favorite events to watch have always been figure skating. We'll have to see what the next week's favorites end up being. With the boys, you just never know, but we intend to enjoy watching the next 9 days!