First of all I focused on the ancient Olympics.
As you can see I have used De Bono's Thinking Hats, Gardners Multiple Intelligences and Tony Ryan's Thinking Keys to set this up.
I found some great reading material about the ancient Olympic games and how the modern games started, which was the basis of my reading programme and the Verbal Linguistic section during the unit, from the net, mostly UK sites. This part of the topic I drove. However, the children decided which order the rest went in. The organised children worked efficiently and moved on. Those who fluff required me to constantly remind them what to do.
The organised ones then moved on to this activity focused on the symbols of the modern Olympics:
Again I have used the three thinking tools used in the previous sheet. This piece of the topic mostly focused on using a dictionary to find out what a motto, symbol, oath and mascot are; how the Olympics use them; how they apply to our school or families or sports teams. I also had reading material to support this in my reading programme and lots of maths problems based around the Olympics using add/sub, mult/div, time and co-ordinates.
My organised children wizzed through these. Some of my fluffers required external motivation. A lot. So then my organised children needed to move onto the 'now' of the Olympics. So this is what they did:
Again, my organised students wizzed through this, so did additional posters when I didn't have them doing the maths activities fore mentioned. My classroom is now colourfully arrayed with a variety of posters about these countries, sports and medallists.
Our school is also doing a mini-Olympics with the help of our wonderful Sport Waikato Energizer, Garth. It was supposed to happen a couple of weeks ago, but due to weather and the flu season, we will be doing it this week. Can't wait.
But now we are observing the Paralympics through our Newsboard each day and we are amazed by Sophie Pascoe and the age of some of the Paralympians in the NZ team.
