Over the course of February, the children in school-age 3 at RisingOaks Early Learning | St. Luke focused on engaging in activities around the 2026 Winter Olympics! This interest started a few weeks into January when some of the children began a game of hockey and decided to name their teams after countries, stating they were “just like the Olympics”. The two teams chosen during this time were Canada vs Russia, choosing corresponding sticks to match the country they were playing for- blue being Russia and red being Canada. Along the lines of countries, we also had some children starting to make flags and discussing the various countries around the world, relating this not only to sports, but from a geographical standpoint as well. Therefore, when the 2026 Winter Olympics began we knew we had to celebrate this exciting quarterly sports competition.
To start we created torches just like the one carried in the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics. We used paper cups and cardboard tubes to create the shape, cutting out the bottom of the cup before securing it to the tube, then covered it in tin foil to make it metallic. To create flames, we used red and yellow tissue paper and glued them to the inside of the cup. Once the torch was complete we got to light it up by sticking a small flashlight on the inside and watched how the light shone through the torch and lit up the flames! Many children were excited to show their parents their torch and how it worked; Claire’s family even made the comment of “we will have to hold this up while we watch the opening ceremonies”.
Winter Sports are of course the highlight of the Winter Olympics, and we can’t celebrate the Olympics without engaging in them. Not every Winter Game is feasible here at RisingOaks, so we had to get creative. We pulled out the crazy carpets and engaged in some sledding as a way of mimicking Bobsledding, Skelton, and Luge, all methods which relate to sledding in some way- for safety reasons, and as per our sledding rules, we had to keep it one or two to a sled, but the others on the team helped push their peers down the hill to make them go faster. We went sledding a few times throughout the Olympics celebrations and even timed the children as they raced down the hill, adding a little competitive factor to the games. Hockey is another sport which was easily played, dividing into teams and getting out our sticks and goggles while choosing teams to compete against each other; this time, the blue team represented the USA while the red team remained Canada, engaging in the long-time rivalry between these two countries and this much-loved sport.
We also made skies out of cardboard and hot glue, and cross country skied around the classroom at a slow and safe pace, making sure not to disrupt those playing around us. For snowboarding, we engaged in a STEAM activity where we created our own characters using pipe cleaners and attached them to a Popsicle stick snowboard. We then made a ramp out of cardboard for our snowboarder to race down. This involved engineering, creative skills, scientific exploration, balancing skills, and precision as we made our characters snowboard down the incline; some even made skiers instead of snowboarders as a way of relating it to other competitive ski-based sports in the Winter Olympics such as Alpine Skiing, Biathlon, Nordic Combined, Ski Jumping, and Ski Mountaineering. Of course, we can’t forget curling; for this we used a tarp as the ice and painted rings on it, and had an old Swiffer broom for clearing the surface. For the rocks, we froze coloured water in bowls and then carefully slid them along the tarp surface, aiming for the blue bullseye. We were surprised how well this version of the game worked out and had a lot of fun doing it.
With so many different sports included in the Winter Olympics we couldn’t help but wonder: how many of these sports have our children engaged in at some point in their lives? We know that there are a multitude of children in our program that play ice hockey, and Aaron has told many tales about his speed skating competitions. But did anyone figure skate, snowboard, or ski? We polled the children to find out and tallied up the results. Hockey came out as the most popular sport, but we were surprised to see that our children had engaged in some of the other more popular sports as well, like skiing and snowboarding, at least once in their life.
The Winter Olympics comes only once every four years, and considering how sports-focused and competitive the group of children in school-age 3 can be, it was the perfect interest to extend and engage in. We got to learn about the various sports played, engaged in representation as we made our own versions of them, and focused on team work and collaboration, all while relating it to real life events happening in our world, and to our country, right now. It prompted a lot of engaging conversations and hopefully we all learned a bit about the other countries in the world as well.
