The kids, with freaky glow in the dark eyes, waking up up early to watch the Olympic opening ceremony.
As we really aren’t all that sporty in this house I thought that the kids would be keen to watch the opening ceremony and then that would be where their interest in the games would fizzle out. However they truly surprised me by showing such a great interest in watching the events, having to be dragged away from the TV at night and wanting it on as soon as they woke to see what had happened while they slept, that I decided to go with it and put aside my sketchy plan for the term. luckily we had just reached Europe in our trip around the world lessons so we focused on England as London was the host city. I had been planning on visiting the other major European countries, we usually read fiction and information books from the country we are focusing on, look up their traditions and landmarks and eat meals that originated there and so on. I asked the kids to chose between that and spending more time on the Olympics and they chose the latter, which I was fine with we can always explore Europe in greater detail later. So all we really did was look on our big map and the countries of Europe and I made an effort to point them our when we saw them competing in the games. 
Instead we learnt about the history of the games and the individual events, revisited Greek mythology looked at what life would be like to be an athlete and had ago at imitating them at our local athletic park. I found an Olympic themed preschool pack so even Sabi could join in. She loved doing her ‘work’ like the big kids. There are more preschool packs over at 1plus1plus1equals1.
Lani decided she wanted to make an Olympic Ring meal she had seen one on the internet made with fruit, I think, but the only fruit we had were bananas so Lani’s creation has coloured icing, BBQ sauce, jam and bananas and they ate them all, gross kiddies.
We also made an Olympic lap book, a lap book on England, completed some worksheets from the Australian Olympic Education site. We read some of the history of Great Britain in a book called Our Island Story which we have been reading on and of all year as I think a good understanding of British history is important for our kids as their Grandparents and Aunty and Uncle were born in England. For our family read aloud we read through a collection of European legends from the middle ages in a book called ‘The Big Book of Knights Nobles and Knaves’. Eli had a little trouble with this book he enjoyed the Arthurian tales of Gawain and Percival’s quests and the tale of Arthur himself but most of the others in the book including Romeo and Juliet and Tristan and Isolde were very tragic and after a few nights he decided that he would leave the room during the dying bits because they made him too sad. The girls had no such problems and are still retelling the part where Roland blew his horn so hard that his head ruptured and blood ran out of his ears.
