Has Olympic Fever hit your house? We know many of our Kindermusik families are making the games a family affair. We’ve seen pictures of Opening-Ceremony-themed family dinners (fish and chips, homemade signs for Team USA, Olympic Rings and Gold Medal cookies), glow-in-the-dark baths with red, white, and blue glowsticks, and even know a family who is playing a version of Olympic BINGO that will span from the Opening Ceremony to the Closing Ceremony.
The games provide endless possibilities for conversations with your child. While watching the events, here are some age-specific conversation starters:
Babies and Toddlers
- Name the colors of the uniforms and flags.
- Talk about the shapes you see (the pool is a rectangle, the ball is a circle).
- Describe the events you are watching. Use verbs to label the movements, etc.
- Use your best Olympic Commentator voice to narrate a gold-medal winning session of getting dressed, drinking a bottle/eating lunch, or even bath time. Be sure the crowd cheers at the completion of the event!
Preschoolers
- Ask which event they’d like to try. Pretend to be an Olympic athlete.
- Keep a count of medals won. Let your preschooler add tally marks to keep track of gold, silver, and bronze.
- Play a rhyming game with Olympic words (what rhymes with red? White? Blue? Badminton?)
- Discuss how to be a good sport.
School-Aged Kids
- Talk about goals. Imagine together how hard Olympic athletes must have to work to meet their goals.
- Find some of the countries competing in the Olympics on a map. Talk about the similarities and differences between the USA and each country.
- Design a team flag, poster, or uniform.
- As you watch events where the athletes earn points, talk about greater than/less than, do some simple addition and subtraction, talk about fractions and decimals.
Because we know music makes everything more fun…
Check out this Kindermusik Olympics Playlist:
(To hear a sample of each song and to purchase, click on the song title to visit Play.Kindermusik.com)
What a Day
Catch Me
Yankee Doodle
Keep the Ball a-Rolling
The Keel Row
Burpee, Burpee, Jumping Jack & Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes
Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah
Swimming, Swimming
Walk and Stop
Follow My Leader to London Town
We know the [Kindermusik and] InJoy Music community is full of creative parents and great ideas. What is your family doing to celebrate the Olympics? Have you been watching the events? Which are your favorites? Will you have a family version of the Olympics? Share with us in the comments!
Contributed by InJoy Music, proudly offering Kindermusik classes in the Lenexa, KS area.