The Olympic spirit was alive and well at Chinook Center School for the Sochi Winter Olympic Games.
There was a celebration on Jan. 31 for the school's 91 kindergarten to Grade 4 students, whose ages range from five to 10.
Patty Teare, a Grade 4 teacher, and Melissa McBride, who teaches kindergarten, organized a series of school-wide events for students, many of them grasping the significance of the Winter Olympics for the first time.
The project was broken into four centres with multi-aged groups of students moving excitedly from one event and creation to another.
Students had the opportunity to honour the Olympics, and of course Canada's participation in the Games, by creatively taking part in Olympic art, learning yoga, creating Olympic torches and being involved in outdoor events, including a torch relay (ingeniously made from a plunger), paper plate discus throwing competition and a beanbag hoop toss.
ìWe just wanted to get them prepared for the Olympics and have them ready to cheer for Canada,î said Teare. ìWe have a centre approach and they go from one centre to the next and do each creation.î
She said some of the events utilized recycled materials.
ìEach kid brought in an old pop bottle. They covered them with tinfoil. At the end we put in a Styrofoam cup and then we covered that with tinfoil all in one and at the end we had red, yellow and orange tissue paper coming out of it as fire,î said Teare. ìThey did a second recycling one with cardboard tubes, dipped in paint of the colours of the Olympic rings and they then did a black silhouette of the different athletes to glue on top of the rings.î
While the young students were being joyfully creative, it was for many their first Winter Olympic experience ñ a first-time opportunity to learn about the finer points of the event's wide range of sports.
ìWe talked about all the different events, and if they had ever seen the Olympics and many of them did have families who do watch all the different events,î said Teare. ìAnd we talked about the ones they would watch and if they knew anybody. They really became aware of sports in the Winter Olympics.î
