Get in the spirit with these fun and educational things to do to participate in Olympic celebrations.
The Olympics are coming up in July, and we’re exciting to start seeing some of the big sporting events return. Get yourself and your child in the spirit and get ready to cheer on Team Canada with these three fun and educational activities!
Have some craft time with rings and flags
Pinterest abounds with all sorts of Olympic-themed arts and crafts projects, and you only have to take a quick look to have an overwhelming number of options to get started. But our personal favourites involve craft projects with the rings and flags themselves.
Did you know that the five Olympic ring colors stand for the five continents participating in the games? Get a little art in, and some important geography lessons, by using some of the crafts to teach about continents, countries, and the flags of participating nations. We especially love these Flag Rocks.
How many different flags can your child learn to identify?
Get the neighbourhood involved with a “torch relay” – and do a little reading on Ancient Greece
Not only does the torch relay stand for friendship and historical continuity for the games, fire has an ancient historical connection to the original Greek Olympics. In ancient mythology, fire was a technology stolen from the Greek gods by Prometheus. There’s some great books on Greek mythology for kids to get kids reading, if they like stories about tricksters and grand adventures! We won’t tell them that some of these tales make up the origins of modern hero adventures as we know them if you don’t.
All “fired” up? Great! Pick up some coloured tissue paper and a paper plate, and get your kids crafting an Olympic flame of their own. They can even personalize their “torch” by modeling it after one of the amazing torches of Olympics past.
Be sure to parade your torches proudly through the neighbourhood so you can advertise…
Hosting your own backyard Olympics
Come up with your own agenda of fun games to “compete” in and get a few great exercises! Some (socially distanced) games we recommend are:
- Frisbee tosses (discus)
- Gymnastics
- Hurdles
- Sprints
Be sure to measure distances for the discus and hurdles, rate for gymnastics, and count time for sprinting! You’ll need a stopwatch app on a phone and a measuring tape, and you can set “competition ranks” or handicaps to make it a little bit more fair between older and younger kids.
Combine this with a fun craft project of homemade medals to give out to the winners.
We hope you have a wonderful time enjoying the games!
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