The Olympic Games provide so many amazing opportunities for learning more about sports that it’s hard to know where to begin! These activities introduce your child to the themes portrayed in the Olympics, as well as give them opportunities to develop physical skills such as crossing the midline which is essential for effective whole-body movement. There are also lots of opportunities to develop your learners’ teamwork skills as well as expand their vocabulary around measurement and comparison as they work out who is the winner and why!
1. Mini-Olympics Ice Hockey
This activity can be easily adapted for younger or older kids. If the kids help with the set-up, it provides a great opportunity to discuss what happens to water when it freezes and talk about reversible changes as the ice starts to melt.
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2. Pool Noodle Javelin Throw
Kids love javelin throw! Add in some technique and prediction work as they throw their pool noodles. The great thing about using pool noodles is that they can be used either indoors or outdoors. You can also get in some measures work as you measure how far each noodle goes.
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3. Match the Flags
This activity can be easily adapted to meet the needs of your preschooler. Print off two copies of the flags, and play “pairs”. Your child will be developing their memory, concentration, and strategy skills as they play. As they get older, introduce the names of the countries for each flag.
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4. Olympic Ring Toss
Help your kids develop their gross motor control and hand-eye coordination as they toss the rings over the pole. Alternatively, have them toss the hoops and see which one goes the furthest– how can they measure which went the furthest? Are standard or non-standard measures the best to use?
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5. Olympic Torch Craft
This is a great craft activity that can then be used to re-enact the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. The kids will develop their gross and fine motor control as a craft. When running, they improve their flexibility, balance, overall motor coordination, posture, and strength.
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6. Olympic Games-themed Colour Sorting
For this activity, grab your giant chalk or your hula hoops to make the Olympics symbol, and then help your child color sort different objects into the hoops. If you’re bringing your little one up to be bilingual, this is a great introduction to language around color, sorting, and comparison.
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7. Backyard Olympics
Backyard Olympics can be fun for the whole family! In setting up any of these activities, you are helping your little one to develop their motor coordination, proprioceptive movement, their balance, and flexibility, as well as their communication skills. They can also help little ones to develop teamwork skills.
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8. Music and Movement
As your kid takes part in the music activities they will be developing their coordination and balance skills. If they are holding an object and swapping it from one side to another, they are crossing the physical midline which is crucial to using both sides of the body effectively together.
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9. Olympics-themed Obstacle Course
Obstacle courses are great fun and so easy to tailor to meet the needs and interests of your children! Obstacle courses can provide a variety of different challenges that little ones can approach in ways that are most suitable for them; leading to some great child-led learning.
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10. Olympic Role Play
Host an Olympic-themed party where your little ones get to act out the parts of registering the athletes, being athletes, and handing out the medals. It’s a great way to help them develop their understanding of events and teamwork. Role play is also great for developing empathy, communication, and language skills.
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11. Olympic-themed Sand and Water Tables
Use your sand trays to recreate sand and water events! Small-world role play can be hugely beneficial in helping little ones make sense of the world around them in a way that suits them. It also helps them to develop specific language and vocabulary skills around the topic.
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12. Table Top Curling
Definitely one for the winter Olympics, but it’s a great take on a really popular activity! This activity will have your little one crossing their midlines, which is essential for helping them develop their coordination, balance, and overall movement. It also helps them develop their mathematical awareness in terms of measurements.
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13. Lego Olympic Rings
Lego provides a great opportunity for little ones to develop their fine motor control as they manipulate the small bricks into position. Get them to build the Olympic rings using their favorite Lego blocks! If they are following a pattern, your child is also practicing visual discrimination and strategy skills.
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14. Olympic Colour and Shape Matching
This is a fun activity to help little ones learn more about shape and color. Extend it further by matching shapes, so hexagonal objects would go through the hexagon, and so on. This is a great activity for discussion around the properties of shapes, including parallel and perpendicular lines.
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15. Olympics Bingo
It’s easy to make an Olympics-themed bingo to suit the needs of your child, or you could download one of the many different ones available online. It’s a great way to improve your child’s visual discrimination skills, social skills, and concentration skills!
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16. Fizzy Olympic Rings
Fizzy Olympic rings are a great way of bringing STEM learning to life! It’s a great activity for predicting what they think will happen and why, and you can prompt them to see if they think all the colors will react in the same way.
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17. Electric Olympic Torch
This incredible activity builds beautifully on the torch craft activity mentioned earlier. It provides a great introduction to electrical circuits, and it’s fabulous for promoting discussion around electrical safety and introducing new vocabulary. You can make it easier by sticking with a simple circuit or harder by introducing parallel circuits.
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18. Frog Long Jump
This is such a fun way of introducing vocabulary around distances, measurement, and comparison with little ones! They can predict which frog will jump the furthest as well as experiment with ways of making them jump further. It’s also great for developing motor control as they make the frogs move.
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19. Backyard Target Shooting
This activity helps your little one to develop their hand-eye coordination as they aim for the target. The target can be as large or as small as your child needs – whilst children need the challenge to develop, too much challenge can be off-putting! Water guns, or even nerf guns, are ideal.
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20. What Makes Balls Bounce?
One thing that kids learn pretty early on is that some balls bounce, and some don’t. But why is this? This simple investigation links the Olympics beautifully with science, as the kids learn how to conduct a fair investigation in addition to extending their understanding of different types of materials.
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21. Shotput
You might want to be outside for this one! Collect together a variety of objects which can be thrown, predict which one will go the furthest, and throw them shotput style. As your child is throwing the objects, they’ll be developing their hand-eye coordination as well as their body positioning skills.
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22. Olympic Relay Race
This is such an easy set-up activity, but the fun is incredible! It combines teamwork with running, math, and engineering skills as the teams work together to build the tallest structure. They can then use their measuring skills to see who has built the tallest tower.
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23. Clothespin Relay
This is another take on the classic relay race. It provides opportunities for your child to practice their color-matching skills, as they will be relying on visual discrimination to match the colors, as well as their pincer grip as they squeeze the pegs onto the colored rings.
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24. PomPom Hockey
Hockey is a great way to start exploring early teamwork skills with preschoolers. Alternatively, it can also be used as an independent activity to get them moving small items with tools into specific areas.
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25. Olympic Skiing
This cute Olympic skiing set-up is essentially a small-world role-play and sporting activity rolled into one! Get your child involved in making the scene (they can add flags, trees, mountains, and ski-lifts), and then race your figures down the slopes. The whole-body movement is great for developing pre-writing skills.
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