Winter Olympics 2010

We began our Winter Olympics 2010 unit study today. And it’s already so much fun!

I wanted to share some of the resources we’ll be using for this unit study. Our main focus will, Winter Olympics 2010, written by Amanda Bennett (AB). If you have never tried unit studies, or AB’s unit studies in particular, this would be a good one to start your foray into this awesome style of homeschooling. AB has everything laid out for you in a daily lesson plan, 4 days a week for 4 weeks. She includes a fantastic book and video list, vocabulary words, copywork, clickable internet links, and other fun, hands-on activities to enjoy with your family. This is true with all of her unit studies. With this Olympics unit, you will cover quite a bit of history and lots of geography!

A couple of other resources we are using include this lapbook from A Journey Through Learning (AJTL). We’ll be doing this mostly in our co-op. We’ll also be using this FREE lapbook from Homeschool Share (HSS) that is being written especially for AB’s unit. You might wonder why 2 lapbooks. Well, the answer is that we are not doing Amanda’s unit study in our co-op, so we needed something a bit “self-contained” for that. Ben and I won’t actually make 2 separate lapbooks, we will combine the 2 into one book. I’ve already printed everything out and it’s working together beautifully. But what my recommendation would be for most families is to either choose AB’s unit study with the HSS lapbook, or the AJTL lapbook by itself, with lots of books to enrich. The AJTL lapbook would work particularly well for the younger kids, K-3rd grade.

We started our day by watching select (very select) portions of a PBS video entitled The Real Olympics. I will caution you right now that this video is NOT for children in its entirety. Men protraying the ancient athletes are scantily clad in flesh-colored g-strings, the reenactment of the games are brutal, and there is talk of s@xual activity amongst the athletes. However, if you preview and are really good with fast-forwarding, there is a lot of good historical information there.

Some books that we read at least portions of include:

We also looked at several websites that told more about the history of the Ancient Olympic Games, found Greece, Canada, and Vancouver on our world map, and looked at a website that told us more about the culture and climate of Vancouver. We discovered that right now it is colder in our “almost” southern city than it is in Vancouver and that the alpine ski resort where much of the olympic competitions will be held had to close to the public due to the unseasonably warm and rainy weather they are having there this winter.

Today was a great homeschool day and an awesome start into this unit study. Ben is excited about what’s coming up tomorrow, and so am I. Once again, I’m learning right along with my student, which is undoubtedly, my favorite part of this whole process!