Learning Activities around the Olympics

The Olympic Games are starting Aug. 5, so it’s the perfect time to bring some Olympic-themed learning and play into your classroom or home.

Edventures with Kids hosted a great Olympics activity roundup earlier this summer that includes geography, STEM activities, learning about Brazil and books about the Olympics. There’s even an activity sheet kids can use to collect points when they do different activities to earn “medals.”

3 Dinosaurs has an Olympics pack of printables for use with kids ages 2 to 7. It includes cutting and writing practice, dot marker pages, counting, puzzles and more, all with a summer Olympics theme. And if you have a preschooler you’ll love these Olympics activities from Parenting from the Heart.

There’s another great roundup of Olympics activities from around the web at the Chaos and the Clutter. You’ll especially want to check out her ideas for hosting your own backyard Olympics. Also look at I Can Teach My Child for a DIY Olympic torch, an Olympic ring pretzel craft/snack and more.

Use basic LEGO bricks to make the Olympic rings, with instructions from Little Bins for Little Hands. Or paint rocks with the national flags of participating countries, which you can see at Non-Toy Gifts.

After all that playful learning your kid deserves a medal, so why not make gold, silver and bronze playdough with a little help from metallic crayons? The instructions are at Sugar Aunts.

Are you excited about the Olympics? What’s your favorite event? I think my daughter will love watching gymnastics.

[Photo via Edventures with Kids.]

Several countries have a day set aside to honor and recognize their inventors, but Nov. 9 is a special one that’s known as Tag der Erfinder in German. It’s celebrated in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and it falls on Nov. 9 because that’s the birthday of Hedy Lamarr.

Hedy Lamarr is widely known as an actress but there’s a lot more to her story. You can get a little of it geared to little kids in the Little People, Big Dreams book Hedy Lamarr (32 pages, hardcover, published 2023 by Frances Lincoln Childrens Books, suggested retail price $15.99).

The book explores her birth in Austria and how she spent time when she was young coming up with inventions. She became an actress, married an arms dealer, made her escape to America and became an actress again.

But she also helped develop a frequency-hopping signal device for airplanes that was used by the Americans and their allies during World War II. That technology became the basis for wireless technology such as wifi and GPS.

While Inventor’s Day is a great time to learn about Hedy Lamarr, you can take this opportunity to check out books and do little studies on lots of different inventors. If there’s an inventor or an invention your child is particularly interested in, that’s a great place to start. It’s fun to think about all the things we use every day that didn’t always exist; someone had to invent them!

For a start here at Craft Gossip you can learn more about Garrett Morgan, who invented traffic lights; Maria Oroso, who developed a clay oven that could cook food without electricity; and more female inventors and scientists.

And for more general inventors’ fun, check out this inventors word search from Fun Findery (and another from Let’s Do Puzzles) or take a quiz on inventors and their inventions from Flanders Family Home Life.

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