Olympics Unit---games and torches

During some of this unit I was at Girl's Camp, so we made it a little less intensive. Sam taught some of the lessons and I taught the others during the times I was home.

I love the Olympics! So does everyone else, so there are a million ideas out there for parties and activities and foods. We didn't really want to make things complicated, so we mostly read books and did a few races and other physical kinds of activities. It was SO HOT all week, so we didn't want to be outside for very long periods at a time.

Bike race

Hula hoop . . . hop? (this was Sam's day)

100 m. dash. It took us a lot longer than 9.7 seconds, I can tell you that.

My favorite activity was our relay races, which we did as a whole family for Family Home Evening. It was nice outside in the evening and it was (I imagine) quite hilarious watching us try to do our exchanges.

The kids requested that we make Olympic torches so they could do a torch relay as well. (We had earlier enjoyed this video about the making of the Olympic cauldron.) I read a bunch of tutorials that all seemed way too complicated, so we just wrapped foil around toilet paper tubes, squeezing it to a sort of point at the bottom, and stuck cut-out flames inside.(I looked at this to figure out how to make 3-D flame shapes.) Another day, when we were spray-painting our Olympic medals, we spray-painted some of the torches too.

Seb particularly liked making flame sound-effects and setting everything around the house on "fire."

I read somewhere the idea of making a time capsule for the Olympics---four years being a shorter time period than many time capsules, but a good amount of time for young kids, who will have changed a lot in those four years. So we wrote down everyone's times and distances in the various "events" (we used strings to measure our long-jump distances, so we had something tangible for that) and put them, together with a few of our medals and some pictures of our festivities, in a shoebox. I closed it with duct tape and labeled it "Summer Olympics time capsule" and put it on the top shelf of my closet. We'll open it again in 2016 (when Abe will be almost 14! Seb 11! Ky 8! Daisy 7! And Junie 5!) and then time ourselves again to see how we've improved. (Or degenerated, as I'm sure will be inevitable in my case!) I think it will be fun to look back and see what's changed in that time.