So, the Olympics are over for another 4 years, but I wanted to add this as a reminder to myself of the fun we had at school. I organized the students into pods and assigned each pod a country and a ring colour. I chose the countries by looking up the top 5 medal winning winter olympic countries from past games. The countries we followed throughout the Olympics were Russia, Norway, Germany, Austria, USA and of course, Canada.
Everyone was cheering for Canada and we had little Canada flags on our pods to wave as we watched events when they were on the tv. We had the tv on all day most days through the Olympics and any time Canada was involved we turned up the volume to watch/listen and of course cheer! This was a lot of fun. I was surprised at how well students did to tune out the tv as they went about the day. Most were able to work without the tv distracting them. I on the other hand could get easily distracted and it was usually me that would draw attention to the tv during non Canada events! Oh well.
(One interesting note: we kept getting emails from the IT guys that we were using too much of the server to stream Olympic events. I was happy to work in an old school that has tv's hanging from the roof still. We just turned on good ol' CBC and watched all we wanted to!)
The students each made a flag of their assigned country and they waved them every morning when we updated the medal count on our classroom graph.
We added the flattened paper candy cups as needed for gold, silver and bronze (red). We sticky tacked them up and did math with the graph everyday. Students could tell me how many more gold medals Canada had than Austria?… How many medals does Russia have all together?… and I was happy at the engagement each student had everyday. We did writing about the events we saw, the athletes, and of course the medal standings. Some students did research at home to learn about their country and shared it with us at school. It was so fun to watch the kids get excited about mens and women's curling! -and we watched the women's hockey final and the men's semi final game as well.
So many great memories together!
Poor Austria, they did not do very well at these games. The kids in the Austria pod did not do very well either. They struggled with behaviour, work habits and too much talking. Eventually this 'country' was moved apart for the rest of the games.
The graph above shows the number of medals each class country won during the games. I awarded a gold, silver, and bronze medal at the end of every day based on behaviour, attitude, work habits and effort. A couple of days I was able to award extra medals too.
But poor Austria, they did not do very well.
Luck of the draw that this struggling pod of students drew Austria as their country. Hopefully they learned from this experience as the 'winning' countries did. When I asked what they learned students told me that they learned it was important to work together, to help each other, and that if one person on the team was struggling it was important to help him/her. Yep. That's what I like to hear.
Austria may have learned other lessons. I hope they learned that each person has to try to be a positive contributor to a team because if you aren't, it is just a tough struggle to be together and maybe even that sometimes it is better to work apart to reduce difficulties between people. (They did better when they were not together.)
The ring colour was assigned because I had them sit in team rows in the gathering area for morning songs and calendar. I had a carpet for each colour ring (thank you IKEA) and they sat behind them. A new line leader every day (they had to keep track!) and points awarded for great participation in these rows too.
I really enjoyed the Olympics!!! I hope my students did too!
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