The Olympics are drawing to a close. I don’t know what we’re going to do with ourselves. In the last 16 days or so, we’ve lived the Olympics. We’ve watched it all. Anything that’s been on network TV, we’ve seen (it’s the first time I’ve really missed having cable!). We started our day every morning with “Today” in Beijing, and then on days when we didn’t have various appointments, we kept the TV on to see the morning/early afternoon coverage, breaking only for our Olympics school. We watched all the primetime stuff (and I do mean all–I planned all the grocery shopping and other errands for the last few weeks so that I was always home in time for the games). I even stayed up and watched some of the late night stuff.
The traditional favorites were, of course, enjoyed–gymnastics, swimming, diving, and volleyball. Turkey also added cycling to his list of favorites, and I discovered a new love of water polo. Heck, we even watched stuff we didn’t really like, including the entirety of both the men’s and women’s marathons (not necessarily by choice, but because we kept hoping they’d break in with something more interesting!) We saw many records set, and cheered on our team. We even turned into the NBC Nightly News and the Olympic Zone, because apparently we just weren’t getting enough of an Olympics fix without them!
Our school allowed us to really immerse ourselves in the Olympic spirit, and we covered almost every subject you could imagine studying about the Olympics, China, and sports. We learned a Bible verse and talked about working your hardest, playing fair, and sportsmanship. We learned a lot of geography in mapping the torch route, and in studying one country from each continent (save Antarctica, obviously), and added in history and government with our country studies. We used counting our team’s medals to learn math, including counting by fives. We learned more about our favorite sports, and then talked about events we’d never even heard of before. In studying China, we learned about everything from architecture to fashion to history. We had music appreciation and art (we colored a lot of pictures!) We even studied a bit of foreign language, learning a smattering of Chinese, and even some Latin. We read stories from around the world, and compared and contrasted the world’s flags. We snuck in a bit of physical education with our family olympics, and craft time with making medals. We even had fun with cooking–one night we made Chinese food for dinner, and then all ate with chopsticks (Turkey was surprisingly proficient in that area!), and we made an Olympics cake, complete with the Olympic rings made from M&Ms (brown is the new black!).
Yep, we’ve really enjoyed our Olympics experience. It’s hard to say what we liked best, because we liked it all. I just don’t know what we’re going to do tomorrow!