When it dawned on me a few months ago that the Winter Olympics were this year I knew right away that was going to be our whole homeschool plan for the month of February.

Since sharing that we don’t stick to a schedule or curriculum in our homeschool I’ve gotten a lot of messages from other homeschool moms that can relate. It was exciting for me to realize that there are a lot of reverse schedulers out there!

In the last few weeks I’ve really be mulling over the idea of homeschool as a lifestyle, we aren’t unschoolers but we do a lot of learning as it comes up in our everyday and the Olympics are the perfect example.

This post isn’t going to be a complete list of resources (Alicia, over at Learning Well just shared a good post about that though!) but rather, some different ideas on how we are going to be hitting different subjects and different conversations I envision taking place.

HOW WE ARE HOMESCHOOLING
THROUGH THE OLYMPICS

HISTORY

In the few days at the beginning of February before the Olympics even start we are going to study a little bit about the history of the Olympics, which countries have hosted in the past and how they choose host countries.

Most of our research will probably be online but I also plan on reading them this Magic Tree House book.

GEOGRAPHY

Next up is my favorite subject! We are going to be taking some time to see which countries are all taking place in the Olympics and while we will definitely be cheering for Canada I’m hoping that we can each pick a few countries that are a little more obscure to root for as well.

In addition, we will be learning about Korea since they are the host country.

The geography side will involve a lot of looking at maps, atlases and globes (and the official Olympics website to find this info).

ART

We already started out by learning a bit about the continents the Olympic rings represent and created our own by tracing out some interlocking circles.

Other art projects that we may do include creating medals our own medals and copying flags.

We will probably look on YouTube for some step by step drawing videos as well.

MATH

The Olympics is such an easy time to incorporate a lot of math! Here are a few ways we will be doing so:

We are going to keep a medal count for Canada as well as the other countries we choose to cheer for.

A topic I foresee coming up is why some countries win a lot more medals than others and I want to discuss population and medals per capita.

Because Korea is 15 hours ahead of us we will also be discussing time zones and doing the math and figuring out what time it is there throughout the day.

SPORTS

There will be a lot of watching of the Olympic events, I plan on preparing my kids for a lot of the events before they start and telling them the general idea of how they work. There are so many events in the winter Olympics that are so foreign to what they are used to.

I tried to explain bobsledding to them this morning in very basic terms and it came out like: riding a sled down a twisty slide covered in ice. They think it sounds amazing. We will also most definitely be watching Cool Runnings. 😉

How do you plan on homeschooling through the Olympics?