2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi

The Winter Olympics begin soon so these are some links we'll use in the classroom to 

help us learn more about the games, the history behind them, the Olympians, the countries they represent and the location of the games this month. Go USA!

Here's the main website for the Olympics... olympic.org
There you can find schedules, information about athletes, countries that participate and more!



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"The 2014 Winter Olympics will take place in Sochi, Russia, from February 7 through February 23. Events are divided into 14 sports—15 if skeleton is counted as a separate sport from bobsleigh. (Here, we’re counting them as a single sport.) Some sports have multiple disciplines—men’s and women’s competitions, relay competitions, and races of different distances. Each discipline will have three medalists—gold, silver, and bronze." ~ from National Geographic Education

For information about the sports played in the winter games, check out Sports of the 2014 Winter Olympics on National Geographic Education.

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From NBCLearn:

Science and Engineering of the 2014 Olympic Winter Games
This 10-part video series, produced by NBC Learn and NBC Sports, in partnership with the National Science Foundation, explores the science, technology, engineering and math of the 2014 Olympic Winter Games.

Science of the Olympic Winter Games
This original video collection explores the physics, biology, chemistry, and math behind the Olympic Winter Games.

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http://cybraryman.com/olympics.html

This is a great collection of things you might want to know about the Game as well as teaching materials from Cybraryman, former teacher Jerry Blumengarten.

Iditarod Prezi by CD

Here's another terrific extra credit project about the Iditarod...

Iditarod by MS

This is the first EXTRA CREDIT project for our class! Well done MS ~ I am very proud of your hard work. :)Ms. G

Long Ago and Today

One of the second grade standards in History Social Science is:

• 2.1 Students differentiate between things that happened long ago and things that happened yesterday.

Some related Historical and Social Sciences Analysis Skills in the area of Chronological and Spatial Thinking are:

• Students correctly apply terms related to time, including past, present, future, decade, century, and generation.
• Students explain how the present is connected to the past, identifying both similarities and differences between the two, and how some things change over time and some things stay the same.

As we address these standards, we'll be looking at some images from the Library of Congress website. If you click on an image below, you'll be taken to the LoC website link for the photo.

 

Other images:
Classroom photo we looked at last week http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8b04325
Classroom with inside of desks visible http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b31080
Field trip http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a30669 
School house http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/hhh.id0029/photos.060288p
School house http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/hhh.pa0602/photos.135986p
Children playing in school yard  http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b15512

I recently attended a workshop about the Library of Congress website put on by The California History-Social Science Project. Here's a blurb about it from their website:

In partnership with The Library of Congress the California History Social-Science Project (CHSSP) has joined a special consortium to provide professional development for teachers as part of their Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) program. Over 150 teachers across the state, including 25 in Orange County and 25 in San Diego County, will have the opportunity to take part in this free program that promises to support instructional use of primary sources in the classroom. 

I really enjoyed the workshop and appreciated the emphasis on inquiry. I have had quite a bit of training in the use of inquiry for instruction in science, math and art so it's great to see that trend continuing. We have a follow up training this week - I can't wait to see what they have in store for us!