It strikes me that the 2010 Winter Olympics provides an ideal opportunity for classroom teachers to teach about place.
I’m not just talking about the host country Canada as there are over 80 countries many of whom have lots of athletes who have qualified for the games.
The Wikipedia entry on the 2010 games provides some good background information and a detailed list of countries who are competing.
Here are some very simple ideas to introduce children into the competing countries:
1) Become an expert in one country (not your own!)
Students could easily pick one of the competing countries and study it in depth. They could follow that counties and athletes progress through the course of the competitions and it could be their responsibility to support them and cheer them on.
They could even up-date the rest of their class on how their country is getting on with regular news broadcasts that could be read out, written down, blogged, podcasted or videoed and then up-loaded to a video sharing site.
2) Personal enquiry driven by investigative questioning
Children could also study a country itself through personal enquiry or a collaborative project. Appropriate questioning (provided by the children) may provide scaffolding for this activity.
Examples of questions might be:
- Where is the country in the world?
- Is it an economically developed country or a less economically developed country? How do you know?
- How far did the athletes have to travel to get to Vancouver (can you measure this in Google Earth or on Bing Map?)
- What time zone in the county in? How will that affect the athletes?
- How well have this country done in the past at winter Olympic events? Are they better at the summer events? What are their strengths and weaknesses as a team?
- Can you complete a country profile showing the location, size, population, and political structure of your chosen location?
- How might the landscape and the climate affect the training of athletes?
- The list of investigative questions could be endless.
There are also lots of great resources to help children study different countries some of my favorites are:
3) Use of webcams
Another fun thing to do if studying another country is to try and get a real feel for what a place is like by using webcams. I used to use Opentopia a lot, but I see now that the site is full of inappropriate advertising, so you would need to be carful using this in schools.
Far better would be to use the webcam layer in Google Maps.
4) Language Learning
Any study of another country also provides a perfect opportunity to learn more about the language that is spoken there. I don’t pretend to be a language expert – I leave that to my pal Joe Dale. But I have had some success in using the following websites when trying teach a bit of language and a bit of place together.
The first is the BBC’s Essential Phrases Website. Its provides at least 12 simple phrases in 36 languages – that are absolutely ideal for use in class.
My favorite language website for schools is of course Mark Pentleton’s Radio Lingua. if you have not seen it go and check it out! The ‘One Minute’ series that they produce is available in 19 different languages and would be absolutely perfect to introduce a new class to a new language during the Olympic Games.
Another nice thing to do during the event would be to keep an eye on the weather in Canada, but also compare it to where you live and the country that you are researching. Again the BBC Weather Website is a pretty good starting place for this type of thing.
Any other ideas for introducing children to different countries?
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