School Olympic Projects/Activities - A Sampler

Sample Olympics-themed school projects from California teacher librarians:

• Elementary School: "I do a simple poster project with my 3^rd and/or 4^th graders – we use an almanac to find the sites of the Winter (Summer) games in various years, and then an atlas to locate those on a map. The students create a poster (Title: Winter Olympics 2010, for example) that labels the location on a world map and draw/color a flag of that country." - Rusty T., Palo Alto
• Middle School: "We have an Olympic display that highlights the medal standings, daily events and whats in the news. It changes daily and we have Olympic questions almost daily in announcements. The display also has free schedules, the Olympic rings, books on winter sports events and pic's of US athletes." -- Teresa E., Santa Rosa
• High School. "Don’t have a camera right now but my tech has done a really great bulletin board with the Olympic mascot in the center, a 3-dimensional torch on one side and the Olympic rings on the other. The rest of the board is filled with 3-dimensional book covers of books about sports, focusing on the winter sports. She’s also done a ‘Books about Sports” bookmark with images of the bookcovers and call numbers of the books." Diana J., Sonoma
  

Flower Sweepers @ Olympic Ice Rink

The bottom front page of the Wall Street Journal features interesting yet somewhat odd human interest stories. Today's story, "Eleven-Year-Old Makes Clean Sweep in Olympic Figure Skating" is about the 30 or so local Vancouver children who tried out to become official volunteer "flower sweepers". Apparently, there is a long tradition in ice skating for fans to toss stuffed animals, flowers, and other items onto the ice after their favorite skater finishes a performance. It is the job of the young volunteers to dart out onto the ice between performances and rapidly scoop up and deposit all the "gifts" into bags to give to the performers. All this in less than two minutes! (See above photo by European Press. WJS article by Media and Marketing reporter, Geoffrey A. Fowler.)

According to the WSJ, 135 children tried out to be flower sweepers. They need to be very good skaters, but also obey the rules including working as a team, don't show off, and gracefully squat down to pick up a toy -- never bend over and offend an audience! The children get to wear sequin-covered outfits.

I'm sure my skating friends Nancy and Megan are familiar with this tradition!