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.

When my daughter was younger I would spend a lot of time trying to come up with activities she could do in the car on long road trips and things to entertain her when we were waiting at restaurants and things that didn’t involve screens.

But it turns out there are a lot of great activities you can do with just a piece of paper and a pen.

What Do We Do All Day has a great collection of pen and paper games, including some that can be done with just one person, though they’re all more fun if you have at least two.

There are some classics on here like hangman and dots and boxes, but there are also quite a few I hadn’t heard of before.

I don’t want to spoil the whole list for you because you should definitely click over there and look around, but I will share about the one that you see pictured above.

This game is called Bridges, and you start by making the big random shape and the dividing it into a bunch of sections (the post says 30-50 sections is ideal but I think this one is smaller than that).

Each player gets their own color marker and you take turns drawing bridges from one space to another, crossing a third. Once there’s a bridge, no other bridges can start, end or cross in those spaces. Keep going until no more bridges can be built, and the person who makes the last bridge wins.

Check out the post over at What We Do All Day for more great ideas for no or almost-no prep games you can play with your kids or that kids can play together. I’d love to know if you have a favorite paper and pen game, whether it’s on this list or a different one.

[Photo: What We Do All Day]

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