Celebrate the Winter Olympics with Kids

As I write this its just about time for the Winter Olympics in Milan/Cortina to begin, so let’s celebrate with some learning activities.

First, a couple of fun facts. This is the fourth time Italy has hosted the Olympics, and the third time it’s hosted winter games. There will be 116 medal events in 16 disciplines, with new medal events including men’s and women’s dual moguls in freestyle skiing, men’s and women’s double in luge (which had existed before but was replaced with a doubles event), men’s and women’s team alpine combined, women’s large hill and individual ski jumping and mixed relay in skeleton.

Also new this year is ski mountaineering, which involves climbing a mountain either on skis or while carrying them and then skiing back down. This Olympic Games has the highest participation of female athletes ever in a winter games, at 47 percent. And for the first time since 2014, the National Hockey League is on a break during the Games so players can participate.

Check out these other Olympic themed articles across our blog.

13 Olympic Crafts for Kids

A STEM Relay Race with a Olympics Twist [Lesson Plans]

Host Your Own Mini Olympics In The Back Yard [Kids Crafts]

It would be fun to learn about Italy or different winter sports found in the Olympics if you like. (That page has explainers for the different sports if there are some you’ve never heard of.

One thing that kids will probably like having to do with the Olympics is checking the medal counts and seeing which country is ahead. This is a great math and charting activity to do with kids of any age. Teach Beside Me has a printable medal tracker you can add the countries to and count the number of gold, sliver and bronze medals they earn.

Create Craft Love has printables specific to the US and Canada, as well as a blank one you can add the country to, where you can color in the number of medals won and count them.

Kids Art & Craft has a nice collection of Olympic themed crafts, including a couple of different DIY medals, Olympic ring art, painted flag rocks and more. I feel like I’ve shared this one for some previous games but I love the simple paper plate ring craft from Meaningful Mama shown here.

3 Dinosaurs has a huge collection of sports and Olympic themed printables and activities that includes both winter and summer sports. And The Price Adventure has some printable activities including Olympic rings to decorate and trace, a medal to design and a flag to decorate.

If you’re looking for more ideas of things to do in the classroom, check out this list of Olympics lesson plan ideas from Homeschool Superfreak.

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

Leave a Reply