Mini-Olympics at Daycare!

Well, we're gearing up for some mini-Olympics at my daycare. We call it the KCDC MINI-OLYMPICS! All this past week we've been working on Olympics arts & crafts and we've made torches, fingerpainted the 5 rings, made medals, and made Olympic flags. Now I've divided all the kids into countries and they have each chosen a different colour to wear all of next week. We are going to have all sorts of indoor and outdoor games so it's going to be soooo much fun! We've made medals and we're working on the flags right now. Yesterday, Friday, we were "training". We grabbed the toboggans, tubes, sleds, crazy carpets, and saucers and had races. I was the commentator and the kids were rolling around on the snow laughing so hard! I called them by their country name and they loved it! The little ones, one-year-olds, were in the baby sleds, "Japan" (L) and "Switzerland" (Mason), watching the whole training event. "Korea" (J2) had a tube so he won gold most of the time. Czech Republic (J1) did a lot of face plants, while Italy (B2) climbed on "Slovakia" (J3)most of the time. The "USA" (B1)had a bit of a problem cheating (all in good fun) and France (R) spent a lot of time on the middle of the hill. "The Netherlands"(Austen) was very cranky so they spent a lot of time in time-out and "Germany" (Megan) was all over the place. "Norway" (L2) and "Sweden" (M) were not present so they will most likely get their training in at another time. :) "Austria" (Ian) was busy shoveling the driveway and "Canada" (Dakota the dog) was chasing after snowballs so he was disqualified.

Of course we are going to have many different friendly competitions next week and everyone is sure to receive at least one gold medal...I'll make sure of that. I know that children should learn the "real life" competition factor but I think they're still so young that it's so hard for them to understand that others might be a bit faster than them most of the time or a bit better at certain things. Therefore I've set up games personalized for each child to excell at. It's so much more fun if everyone can win at something...even if the games are just a little bit rigged by me to achieve a sense of accomplishment for all.