Why the Olympics?
Who doesn’t love the Olympics? The Olympics can bring so much fun into the language classroom. You can talk about countries, nationalities, sports, descriptions of people, clothes, weather and so much more. The Olympics are also not a topic seen in textbooks. It is something that happens in real life, in the real world. Topics that can really connect with students tend to be more exciting and bring engagement to the classroom.
An Activity
I plan on covering an entire unit on the Winter Olympics that will last about 2 weeks. For this activity, you will need to have access to the Internet. One activity that I will be bringing to my students is getting to know the athletes of the Winter Olympics. This activity was inspired by Carolina over at Fun for Spanish Teachers. This Olympic themed lesson will practice questions and answers in an interview style communication activity. It will be a review of topics like sports, nationalities and physical descriptions. You can also use this to talk about Deaf Olympians and the Deaflympics to add soem culture to your lesson.
Get Students Talking
The first thing I plan to do is get students using the target language by discussing the Winter Olympics and what they know about them. Next would be to use Google Earth to look at the Olympic Stadium and its surroundings. This will give students things to talk about. You can ask questions or just let students chat about what they see. There is a fact card that appears on the right of the map that can be used to link to Wikipedia and show more facts that can be discussed. Ask each student to state a fact about what they have seen or read. Facts should not be repeated, so this means students must focus. Weather can also be a topic of discussion here since many kids won’t know what the weather is really like in another part of the world.
The Interview
Use this page for finding out facts about Olympic athletes. And use this worksheet to have students plan. Once the planning process is over, pair them up and let them interview each other. To extend this activity, make extra copies of the “Information About the Athlete” sheet and have students rotate around the room to do many interviews.
Have fun with the Olympics in the Classroom.
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