Go For Gold!

In celebration of the recent Olympic Games a fellow home school mom had a great idea to help bring the 2016 Olympic Games to life for our little learners. Her idea was to host her own Home school Olympics; play some relay games and do a flag matching competition and eat some food! It sounded super fun so I didn't  hesitate to click "Going" on my Facebook Invite. But as soon as I clicked"Going" I panicked...

"Wait We are going to go to an Olympic party but we haven't even watched the Olympics!?!?! Match flags??? I better start teaching them! I don't want them to be the only ones there who don't know what the Olympics are...We need to watch the Olympics!!!"

Now in order to properly prepare my children for an Olympic Party I have to teach them a little bit about the Olympics. Or so I thought....

I had it all "planned out" in my head how and what I was going to teach them. But the days kept passing and since our school year starts next week I have been in organizing and preparing mode. So we didn't learn anything about the Olympics the week before,but I was determined to teach them on Monday (the party was on Tuesday). As it is now Saturday I don't remember what happened Monday but yet another day went by and I don't know if I even mentioned the word Olympic.

The day of the party I tried to pull up some videos, give a brief history lesson and explain what the Olympics were (at least to my oldest!) Well we watched for 5 minutes as the camera went around the stands showing us the crowd (which did give us an opportunity to talk about other countries flags!) but as soon as the track and field event was about to start the video wanted me to sign in and we weren't authorized to see the rest... EPIC FAIL!



But oh well there was no more time to prepare we had to go...for a moment I thought maybe we just shouldn't go...but that was a silly notion! So as we walked to the car I just went over the fact that the Olympics was an international sporting event. Tripp seemed satisfied with that information, Mia didn't even care!

We went and the kids had a BLAST!!!!! It didn't matter that they didn't know much about the Olympics or whose flag was whose. Mia is only 2 and well her age group did the free for all event! LOL And Tripp had a blast competing in relay races and playing with his friends. In the end he even won 3 silvers and a Gold medal!!!!!!

Sometimes when we are preparing our kids for things we put too much emphasis on the facts and forget that most kids learn best through experience. I totally dropped the ball on any Olympic Lesson Planning, but that didn't take anything away from their learning experience!!!