Olympic Glory! (Just because something happens during summer does not mean it cannot be taught in fall...)

The Olympics. I remember when I was fourteen and got into the 1996 Summer Olympics, the year of gymnastic glory with the two Dominiques (Dominique Dawes and Dominique Moceanu), Shannon Miller's balance beam domination, and Kerri Strug, who endured a pretty traumatic injury. I remember well, because I cut out numerous articles about the gymnastics team and made a scrapbook of sorts.

There are some interesting resources online for teaching about the Olympics. I really like the ones Reading A-Z has to offer. The 2012 Summer Games Theme Pack offers a plethora of picture cards, maps, and leveled readers. 

The resources are free if you try a 7-day free trial at Reading A-Z, and the page is a little off the beaten path of the main index because it is a compilation the Reading A-Z team got together very recently. All the picture cards and maps are new. I like how they offer the venue map and torch relay map.

Has anyone read the Scholastic article "Olympians vs. Animals" before? If not, it's pretty fascinating. It appeared in the May 2012 issue of Scholastic SuperScience, though I have read it somewhere else with my students before. (I believe it was in one of Scholastic's non-fiction reproducible books.) It is an excellent article for making comparisons and main ideas/supporting details. An Olympic sprinter is compared to a cheetah. A rhino beetle is compared to a weight lifter. An Olympic swimmer is compared to a sailfish, and a flea is compared to an Olympic high jumper.

Here are some other resources:

• Teachervision (not to be confused with my website, Teachingvision.org) also offers some Olympics-related resources. 
• The It's Greek to Me! game from Scholastic also came to my mind while I thought of Olympic resources I have used in the past. The vocabulary game focuses on roots on a few different levels- "archery" (easier) and "discus" (more challenging). 
  
• Also, if you have any Olympians from your state, it is neat to teach your students about their accomplishments. When I conducted a search here, I was amazed to see how many Olympians come  from Florida aside from Ryan Lochte. 
• Here is a nice list relating to the 2012 Olympics from Projectbritain.com. 
• Here is Cleverclassroom's Olympics 2012 Pinterest page! 
• Here is a page citing all kinds of wonderful resources. Seeing this page was made a while ago, it may be slightly out-of-date, and not all links may work as they did when the person created the page.