Weekly Wrap-Up: Going for the Gold

I missed my opportunity to link this to the weekly wrap up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers, but I'm going to blog about it anyway. Go me!

 (After I had my post written, it got delayed in actually being published to my blog because I don't know how to get photos from the camera to the computer. So, this post is now written about events that took place two and three weeks ago. Don't be confused about the first sentence. We aren't STILL watching the Olympics.)

The last two weeks of school can be summed up in a question Toa of Boy asked. "Mommy," he said, "why did you make us start school early if we were just going to stop and watch Olympics?"

Good question. It has a perfectly reasonable answer. Poor planning.

Moving on....here's what we DID do.

I printed out a metal tracker worksheet from education.com.  I had to sign up to have access to the worksheet, but it was a pretty painless sign up process. Toa of Boy and Sweetling were both really excited about it!

We watched the opening ceremonies together. During the parade of nations, each of the kids had an inflatable globe. They raced to find the nation marching in before the next nation was announced. Nice geography lesson!

Each day, we checked on which events had awarded metals and wrote down which country got the gold, silver, and bronze for that event. This was a nice daily spelling lesson for Toa of Boy. And, since the webpage only showed the flag of each country who had medalled, Sweetling got to impress us all with her flag recognition skills. (Hovering the computer cursor over the flag brought up the athlete's name and the country's three letter Olympic abbreviation.)

We recorded the events every day, all twelve or so hours. Then I'd fast forward through most of it, and we'd watch a few things that were of interest....spots about London, stories of athletes, a sampling of the different events.

And of course, despite Toa of Boy's claim, we did do some regular school....just not nearly as much. We managed to squeeze in a couple of lessons for each child each day. (Except the days after the women's team and women's all-around gymnastic finals. No school happened those days. Only gymnastics viewing did.)

Check out the cool cell diagram Toa of Boy made out of wikisticks--