The Winter Olympics

Well the 2018 Winter Olympics have come and gone and I'm getting this post up just a pinch too late.

Confession:  I'll often spy good ideas to write about or do in my classroom one day but I save them an entire year when that holiday or season comes around again.  Since the Olympics aren't coming around again for another 4 years I decided it was 100% okay to write this now.

Anyways I spied this in one of the classrooms I visited this last month

2018 Olympic Games Medal Count Poster

and it reminded me of one that I had done with my students when I taught grade 4 

2014 Olympic Games Medal Count Bulletin Board

I had my grade 4 students pick a few countries that they wanted to follow during the Olympics (we picked Canada, USA, Germany, Russia, and China) and on our hallway bulletin board we kept track of how many medals they got pictograph style (I think we might have even had 1 picture (of a medal) = 2 actual medals won.  I can't remember if we kept track of how many gold, silver, and bronze medals each country got... I feel like we may have kept track of those in a notebook but on the bulletin board we just kept track of the total medals won.  

On the other side of the bulletin board they each wrote some predictions about what country they thought would do best, how many medals that country would get and how many of the medals would be gold, silver, and bronze.

After the Olympics were over and we knew the totals of those 5 countries medals I taught them about graphing.  They already knew about pictographs because of the giant one we were adding to every day in the hall so I figured we would do some bar graphs.  So off to the computer lab we went and I taught them how to make a graph in Excel and we all printed one off (these graphs had the medals broken down into gold, silver, and bronze).

But we weren't done then.  After this I had them come up with some questions that they could answer by looking at their graphs.  It could be something simple like "how many gold medals did Canada get? or something more challenging like "how many gold medals did all 5 countries get?".  I left it up to them decide on the questions... 

Here are some of the results..

The white paper on the bottom with their questions on it was folded in half so that when you flipped it up you saw their answers and thinking.

I'm still pretty proud of that bulletin board and what we all did with the Olympics that year. 

What did you do in your classroom to celebrate the Olympics?