How to celebrate the Olympics in your classroom

We love a good excuse to bring real-world, cross-curricular learning into the classroom and the Paris 2024 Games is no exception! We’ve collected an olympic-sized list of ways you can connect this exciting event to daily learning in your F-2 classroom, with Olympics-themed games, activities, lesson ideas and resources to cover almost every area of the curriculum, including Literacy, Maths, The Arts, History & Geography!

Keen to learn more? On your marks… 🏃‍♀️‍➡️

Potato Olympics

We couldn’t write a blog post about bringing the Olympics to your classroom without mentioning the Potato Olympics, an idea initially conceived by the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute. This has quickly become a popular and beloved event in primary classrooms from Foundation all the way through to Grade 6, but if you only hold them on an Olympic year it makes it super exciting and new for your students (and for the teachers, too!).

Image Credit: Victorian State Government Education & Training Numeracy Guide

Every school has a slightly different approach to the Potato Olympics, but the general premise is that students each bring a potato to school to decorate as their own special athlete. Students might choose their potato athlete’s name, country, flag and special skills and compete as an individual, or perhaps athletes are placed into pre-determined groups that will have students working collaboratively to earn medals for their ‘country’ (this is a great opportunity for learning about data collection, graphs and tallies, too!)

Then begins a day, week or fortnight of special Potato Olympics-themed events. The possibilities for fun and/or curriculum-aligned activities are endless, but here are just a few of our favourite ideas:

• Opening Ceremony - no Olympics is complete without a grand ceremony to open the event. Students design a special poster for their potato athlete that includes their picture, name, country, flag and favourite sport, and parade their potatoes proudly around the classroom! This could be a great chance to listen to and learn about the national anthems of different countries around the world.
• Potato Weightlifting - find items in the classroom that are lighter and heavier than your potato, using balance scales to compare mass. Points could be awarded for finding an item that is exactly the same weight as your potato, for ‘creative’ comparisons, for the heaviest and lightest potato in the class, or for the closest guess for how much your potato weighs.
• Downhill Sprint - roll your potato down a ramp. The potato to roll the furthest distance wins.
• Potato Diving - drop your potato from a pre-determined height into a bowl or bucket of water. Measure the amount of water leftover in the bucket and award points based on either the biggest or smallest splash!
• Potato Bowling - you could use the rules of either ten pin bowling or lawn bowls, depending on your preference. Athletes could win points based on how many pins they knock down with their potato, or they could roll their potato towards a target, with the closest potato winning the most points.
• Relay Race - play with regular relay rules, but each ‘country’ nominates a potato to use as their baton. All of the country’s athletes win points for being the first across the finish line.
• Shot Put - standing on a line, throw your potato as far as you can!
• Potato Gymnastics - set up a stopwatch and spin your potato - longest spin wins.
• Golf - using a golf club, cricket bat or any other sports equipment you can get your hands on, students guide their potato towards a target. Fastest to reach the target wins.

Literacy

Olympics Writing & Talking Prompts

Writing prompts are a fantastic way of giving students creative and authentic opportunities to practice a range of early literacy skills, from spelling and vocabulary to text type and punctuation - and they can easily be repurposed as talking prompts to improve speaking and listening, too! Here are some ideas to get your students excited about stretching their creative muscles.

• If I were an Olympian, I would compete in… because… I would need to be… (describe the qualities that fit the sport, i.e. fast, brave, competitive, a good team-player)
• What is your favourite event to watch? Why?
• Invent your own Olympic sport. Is it a team or individual event? What equipment would you need? What are the rules and how do you win?
• Create a new Olympic Mascot. What is its name? What animal or character is it? Write a story about an adventure that your mascot might have at the Olympic games.
• Write a persuasive text about why people should watch your favourite Olympic event. Why is it the best sport to watch? What makes it more exciting than other events?
• Imagine that you are an athlete competing at the Olympic games. Write an imaginative story about how you made it to the Olympics, or an exciting end to your event.
• Choose an athlete from your favourite event. Write a list of questions you would like to ask them. What would you like to know about their journey to the Olympic games or their hopes for the future?
• Describe your perfect day as a spectator at the Olympic games. What events would you like to see? What food would you eat? Who would you go with?
• Imagine you won a gold medal at the Olympics. How would you feel? Who would you like to thank in your victory speech?
• How do athletes in team sports like football or basketball support each other during a game? How do they work as a team and what might they say to each other if they win or lose?

Vocabulary

The Olympics is a great time to explore content-specific vocabulary, with opportunities for learning tier 2 and 3 words such as ‘athlete’, ‘ceremony’ and ‘paralympian’ alongside sport names, action verbs and words in languages other than English. Here are some fun tasks and activities to elevate your students’ vocabulary over the Olympic period.

• Brainstorm a big list of Olympics-themed words, either as a whole class or in small groups of students. Add to the list any other relevant vocabulary you’d like your students to be able to read, write and say.
• Have students create categories for your Olympics vocabulary words. For example, they might group them into ‘Sports’, ‘Doing Words’, ‘Colours’, ‘Celebration Words’, etc. These can be turned into posters and displayed in the classroom
• Create flashcards or memory/snap cards from your list of words
• Have students choose words they would like to use in their future writing to record into their personal dictionaries or onto index cards to attach to a card ring
• Use words from your vocabulary list for orthographic mapping activities
• See if you can come up with an A-Z Olympics Word Display. As a class, can you think of an Olympics-themed word for every letter of the alphabet? A is for Athlete, B is for Bronze…
• Learn some Olympics-related words in different languages. Maybe you could learn some French phrases to honour the host city of Paris, or explore how to cheer on your favourite athletes in their native tongue. Allez!

Picture Books

Learning through picture books is one of our favourite things to do, and there are certainly no shortage of sports- and Olympics-themed stories to choose from. Here are some top picks for your classroom this year.

Little People, Big Dreams

This special series celebrates the lives and achievements of notable people in every field, with a decent collection of stories about athletes for you to explore with your class. Learn about the inspiring life story of gymnast Simone Biles, or how sprinter Usain Bolt went from playing cricket in a rural town in Jamaica to breaking world records at the Olympic Games.

Olympig - Victoria Jamieson

A wonderful story of determination and resilience, Olympig will have your students giggling throughout with a special message that it’s okay not to always be a winner, and that a positive mindset can help find the good in any situation!

Koala Lou - Mem Fox & Pamela Lofts

When Koala Lou's mother becomes too busy with her younger siblings to give her the attention she desires, the young koala decides to enter the Bush Olympics to win back her mother's affections. A heartwarming story that highlights the enduring love of family.

Wombat Wins - Jackie French & Bruce Whatley

A sweet and hilarious story of a wombat who accidentally wins all of the sports day events in her quest for carrots!

The Friendly Games - Kaye Baillie & Fiona Burrows

The true and inspirational story of Australian John Wing, who wrote a letter to the Olympic Committee during the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games suggesting that athletes walk freely in a mixed group of all nations at the Closing Ceremony. Great for teaching history, inclusivity and friendship. The author’s website includes some helpful teacher notes and activities.

We Are Matildas - Shelley Ware & Serena Geddes

Matildas fever ran wild during the 2023 Women’s World Cup, and with the popular football team hoping to secure their maiden Olympic medal this year, they’re sure to captivate the attention of the nation once again. This story celebrates team spirit, inclusivity and determination as budding football star Jazzy recruits the neighbourhood kids to form a football team known as ‘The Little Matildas’ for an upcoming tournament.

The Possum Creek Olympics - Dan Vallely

A fabulous rhyming book about a community of Australian animals that has been chosen to host the next Olympics. The animals work hard to set up an Olympic village at Possum Creek and compete against other animals from around the world.

Write to an Olympian

This is a wonderful way to sharpen students' letter writing skills in an authentic and meaningful way by having them write a support or congratulatory letter to their favourite athlete. The Victorian Institute of Sport has provided an address where you can post your letters addressed to any of the Victorian Olympians or Paralympians listed on their website, however if your favourite athlete hails from a different state or country, this teacher has a bright idea for delivering your students’ messages.

Mathematics

A wide range of mathematics concepts can be explored through the lens of the Olympic Games. As well as a number of the activities listed in the Potato Olympics section above (that can be easily adapted for use without potatoes, too!!), here are some ideas to bring the Olympic spirit to your Maths lessons.

Medal Tally

Keep up with your favourite countries’ medal scores with this free Medal Tally app from Mrs Learning Bee. You can use this data with your students to create graphs and charts, practice counting and understanding place value, find the total of the bronze, silver and gold medals a country has won, find the difference between two countries’ medal tallies, count how many more medals a country would need to be the overall winner, and many other mathematical concepts.

One Minute Madness

Time is abstract, and young children can often find it difficult to fully grasp the mathematical concepts of seconds, minutes and hours. Give them lots of chances to practice by setting a range of Olympic-style challenges to complete within one minute. How many star jumps can you do in one minute? How many throws and catches with a partner? How far can you get around the oval? Can you balance on one foot for a minute? How many pieces of rubbish can you collect in a minute? Have students take a guess at what ‘score’ they might get in a minute before they have a go.

Ordering Numbers

There are so many ways you can practice ordering numbers using Olympics statistics. Put medal winners in order from least to most, order swimming or sprint race times from fastest to slowest, put countries in order from the least number of participating athletes to the most, or order athletes by their age or height.

Ordinal Numbers

Sporting events are the perfect way to teach about the terms ‘first’, ‘second’, ‘third’ and so on. Use your Potato Olympics activities to teach this concept, or hold a series of mini-games in your class and have students create their own medals with ordinal numbers on them. And if you’re still in need of a fun and catchy way to remember your firsts, seconds and thirds, Cub Club subscribers can watch our Ordinal Numbers video and have a dance-along while they’re at it!

Measurement

If you’re holding your own Olympics events at school (potato or otherwise), this is a great opportunity to get students practicing their measurement skills. Whether they’re using informal measurements such as unifix cubes or paperclips or formal measurements with a ruler or trundle wheel to determine a winner for a running or throwing event; comparing light and heavy objects in a ‘weightlifting’ competition; comparing Long and Short distances, or using a stopwatch to track the results of a race, there are ways to build this skill into every event. There are some more fantastic ideas for a measurement-focussed classroom Olympics event here.

You can also use statistics from the Olympic events to explore measurement further. Set up your own 100m sprint, measuring with a trundle wheel so that students can visually see how far it is, and see how your students’ sprint times compare with the athletes’ times. Explore what kinds of objects have the same mass as the weights that Olympians lift in the weightlifting events, or which objects are the same height as the high jump.

Geography & History

What better way to learn about the countries, flags and languages of the world than when you can tie it in with Olympic events? If you’re watching events in class or tracking the medal tally, you could use this opportunity to explore the countries that come up - put a pin on a map every time you come across a country your students are unfamiliar with or interested in, then learn more about that country. What does their flag look like? What language do they speak? What foods do they eat? What sport has won them the most medals? You could use Google Earth and Google Streetview to explore what these countries look like, too. Students could create a fact booklet about their favourite country and present these to the class.

With a 3000 year legacy, the history of the Olympic games is a fascinating topic to explore. You can learn more by watching this video from Bedtime History or this one from Fun World For Kids with your students.

The Arts

Not to be biased, but we think the Arts is pretty important, and what better excuse to get creative than with a range of Olympics-themed activities! Here are some fun and inspiring ideas to bring the excitement of the Olympics into your creative projects this year.

Crafts

Credit: DLTK's Crafts for Kids

Credit: Glitter on a Dime

Credit: Parenting Chaos

• Olive Leaf Crown. This would be great for students to make for an Opening or Closing Ceremony parade!
• Olympic Ring Circle Painting. Fun and easy for the littlies, and a great way to teach students more about the significance of the Olympic Rings. You could ask parents to donate paper towel tubes for this activity.
• Olympic Hand Print Medals. If you’re holding any kind of Olympic-style events in your classroom, why not have your students create their own special medals to go with them? No need to stick to handprints either - students could carve any kind of design into the modelling clay.
• Flag Rock Painting. What a fun, hands-on way to teach students about the flags of the world! These would be a great accessory if you’re running Potato Olympics in your class, or just a great way to practice fine motor skills with a geography theme.
• Olympics Friendship Bracelets. Beaded friendship bracelets are having a moment right now (thanks Taylor Swift!), so you can be sure your students will get right on board with this activity. Using alphabet beads, students can create their own bracelets to show support for their favourite country, athlete or sport.
• Olympic Torch Craft. Use paper plates and tissue paper to create these easy Olympic Torches. You could use these to host your own classroom Olympic Torch relay.

Credit: Non Toy Gifts

Credit: No Time for Flash Cards

Credit: Fun Loving Families

Music

• Listen to the national anthems from different countries. How does the melody make you feel? What are their main messages and why do you think they’re important to each country?
• Have students work in groups to come up with their own chants or songs to support a favourite country or athlete.
• Explore some of the popular music from countries around the world. Listen to a new style of music each day and have a discussion about what you hear. What instruments are used? How are they the same or different to music that you listen to? Which style of music is your favourite?
• Listen to the Official Olympics Hymn and discuss what you hear. What words would you use to describe this piece of music? Is it fast or slow, loud or soft? What instruments are used? Do you think it’s a good song to accompany the Olympic Games? You can learn more about the anthem here.

Looking for more?

Check out some of the links below for more teaching resources and ideas to bring the Olympics to your classroom this year!

• The Australian Olympic Committee has a dedicated schools Resource Hub with curriculum-aligned lesson plans, interactive slides, printables and inspiring videos. You can filter by resource type, category and year level to find exactly what you need.
• ClickView has been welcomed as the official Education Platform for the Paris 2024 games. Schools will have free access to daily highlights, medal moments and Australian athletes’ stories, as well as hundreds of other Olympics-themed videos and resources for all of Term 3.
• The Olympic Museum has an extensive resource library as well as an Educators Hub with lessons, videos and digital education kits to help you ‘bring the spirit and history of the Olympic games alive’ for your students.

We’d love to know how you’re celebrating the Olympics games in your classroom this year! Will you use any of the ideas above or do you have your own grand plans? Get in touch via our Contact form to share your brilliant ideas!

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