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2008 Summer Olympic Games Primary Lesson PlansAn Olympic Themed Elementary Reading, Writing, and Math Unit
The Summer Olympic Games are a great way to use sports to motivate primary school students to increase reading and writing skills and practice elementary math concepts.
Teachers can capitalize on the spirit of the 2008 Olympic Games by creating lessons with an Olympic theme. Primary school students’ ability to comprehend and retain information is increased when teachers use one topic, such as the Olympics, to tie together multiple subject areas. Olympic Themed Reading Lesson IdeasThe Olympics provide a great opportunity for elementary school teachers to add excitement to traditional reading lessons. Teachers can use newspaper articles to teach reading comprehension strategies such as summarizing and questioning. Each student in the class can be assigned a country to read about and can keep a summary journal detailing that country’s Olympic activities. They can also generate teacher-like questions about the newspaper articles to create an Olympic trivia game. Many compound words are also Olympic terms. Students can expand their vocabularies and sports knowledge by studying words such as basketball and teamwork. They can show their understanding of the new terminology by using it to write a concrete poem. Olympic Themed Writing Lesson IdeasTeachers can use the Olympic theme to develop students’ expository and informative writing skills. During the games students can respond to daily writing prompts about the Olympics. For example, the writing prompt could be, “Which Olympic event are you scared to try? Why?” Students can also practice informative writing by composing newspaper-style articles. Teachers can have students watch an Olympic event for homework and take notes on it. They can then use their notes to write an article about the event for a classroom sports magazine. Students can also pretend they are sports reporters and write and present oral reports about a Summer Olympic sport. For increased motivation and fun the reports can be videotaped and given to the students to play for their families. Olympic Themed Math Lesson IdeasTeachers can use the Olympic information the students are learning about in their language arts classes to enhance their math lessons. Students can practice graphing and charting skills by keeping track of the medal count for different countries or an athlete’s race times. These graphs can be used as visual aids for their concrete poems or newspaper articles. Teachers can teach the concepts of mean, median and mode using Olympic time trials or scores. The students can average race times to find the mean, analyze high jump scores to find the mean or middle score, and list basketball free throw percentages to find the mode or most often occurring percentage. Elementary reading, writing and math concepts are easily taught using the 2008 Summer Olympics to motivate students. Teachers can use their creativity and imagination to work the Olympics into all of their lessons during the unit. There is no limit to the number and type of topics that can be taught with an Olympic based theme.
The copyright of the article 2008 Summer Olympic Games Primary Lesson Plans in Primary School Lesson Plans is owned by Megan Sheakoski. Permission to republish 2008 Summer Olympic Games Primary Lesson Plans in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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