Celebrating the Olympics with Kids : 2

Yeah, ok, so this particular post didn't happen on Friday. But I have a good excuse!

My mom moved to town.

So that pretty much threw our week off as we were welcoming her to Oregon and getting her cottage set up. It's been crazy busy and blogging fell by the wayside.

Due to the activity of the last week, we didn't spend as much time focused on the Olympics as I might have liked. (We did watch quite a bit of synchronized swimming though!) One thing I was inspired to try to do was to make meals from our countries of choice. However, we only made it as far as Canada. It so happens that Bookworm1's favorite type of pizza is Canadian Bacon. I looked up the origin of Canadian Bacon and discovered that it actually is from Canada! You never know sometimes . . . despite the name and all! (At least, it is Canadian according to this source.) Apparently when there was a shortage of pork in the United Kingdom in the 1800's they imported the meat from Canada. The English preferred to smoke this preserved meat and it created the flavor of the same meat we know and love today. In discovering this, I figure that by making and eating Canadian Bacon pizza, we covered both Canada and London Olympics 2012 in the same meal. (In case you are wondering, yes, I did explain the history of the meat as we ate it.)



Homemade Canadian Bacon Pizza = Canada/United Kingdom/and probably the U.S. as well. Yes?

I obtained a recipe from a friend who married a Korean for Korean Beef Bulgogi but since we ran of out opportunity, we'll have to save that meal for another night here soon. Judging from the ingredient list, it will be a hit with the family!

At the start of the Olympics, I picked up some chocolate gold coins in the bulk bin at a local market. For several meals, we used our white plates and put these napkin holders with a gold coin on top at each place setting:



A chocolate gold coin/medal for dessert was always well-received. Go figure.

On a shopping trip to Goodwill (with my mom!) I found a copy of I Wonder Why Countries Fly Flags: and Other Questions About People and Places which we took the time to read. Big. Hit!!! Bookworm1 loved this book. It is filled with random facts about various countries and answers questions like, "What is a country?" and provides basic information as to why we each have our own flags, etc. The information is presented in a manner which is excessively easy for a five year old to understand and I am a huge fan of it. This was a perfect book for us to be using in relation to the Olympics and developing a basic understanding of geography.



Gotta tell ya - I was really, really happy when we turned to one page spread and found an illustration of various country flags. I asked Bookworm1 to name as many countries as he could just by looking at the flags and he picked out quite a few that he can identify on sight! It's really awesome and fun to see how much information he has absorbed about the whole world by watching the Olympics.

Lastly, we continued to use the Barefoot Books World Atlas iPad app and I noticed that if you drew up information about a country, it also kept you informed as to how many medals each country had racked up in the 2012 Olympics! (For example, click on the flag of any country and the last line of information included stated that particular country's current medal count. Very, very cool!)



(Note: you can't see it from this screen shot. I don't know that this information will stay available on the app. I just noticed it was available during the games and thought that was very cool and helpful!)

Last week I mentioned that our family members had each chosen different countries to root for during the Olympic games (other than American, of course). The winner of the most medals was to win 10 chocolate chips. So how did we fare?

First of all, I am excessively happy to announce that at the time I am posting this, according to the official Medal Count website, the United States won the most medals, beating out every other country in the world!



USA won 104 medals in the London 2012 Olympic Games!!!

GO TEAM USA!!!

(Since USA won, maybe we should all have at least ONE chocolate chip in honor of our victory? What do you think?)

The official winner of the 10 chocolate chips is Daddy, who chose China because of their ability to play table tennis well. They won a modest 87 medals.

Bookworm2, having chosen the Russian Federation because of it's famous Choo Choo, comes in third place with 82 medals.

Bookworm1 chose South Korea and came in with 28 medals.

Mommy chose Canada because she is loyal to the very end. I came in fifth place with 18 medals. (They might do better with winter games, no? Well, I still like them!)

And thus we bring our Olympic Games adventures to a close.

It's been fun.

We'll do it again in 2014 -- next time focusing on Sochi. Don't know where that is? Look it up!