Olympic Day

Hi, Everyone. Long time . . . no blog, yes? I certainly haven't meant to neglect this little space of mine for so long, but sometimes it just happens. 

Did you all know that today is Olympic Day? Olympic Day is celebrated around the world on June 23rd every year as a day to commemorate the revival of the modern Olympic games. Some of my long time readers may remember my feelings about the Olympics, so in celebration of Olympic Day, I decided to post about all the fun activities I did with my littles this past February during the winter Olympic games!

Back in the late fall, I found this fun little Americana Jell-O kit clearanced at a local store and snatched it up. I thought it was the perfect thing to pull out for the Olympics!

We made up the Jell-O on the night of the opening ceremonies.

I had told the kids a lot about the Olympics, so they were very excited to see what it was all about! Plus, who doesn't love Jell-O? :-)

We made both the red and blue Jell-O for the mold.

I let Bren stir quite a bit, so I had a mess on my hands after it was all said and done. Oh well, he loved the experience!

Our Jell-O mold all ready to go in the frig!

The opening ceremonies were a great opportunity to talk to the kids about the world, different countries, flags, etc. Brianna soaked up every word and had a TON of questions! She also couldn't wait to eat her Jell-O!

I thought the little molds came out so cute!

What a fun way to kick-off the Olympic games at our house!

For the next two weeks while the games were going on, we watched a lot of them on TV in the evenings at house. It's pretty unusual for us to have the TV on during the evening, so this was definitely a special treat. During the day, I did several Olympic themed activities with the kids.

The first activity we did was making our own flags. Like I said above, we had talked a lot about flags and especially about the American flag. To make our own flags, we started by painting a craft stick red.

Then, I cut a piece of blue cardstock in half and painted the kids' hands red, white, and blue. Very quickly after painting their hands (so the paint wouldn't dry), we stamped their hand onto the blue cardstock.

After letting the cardstock dry for a bit, I let the kiddos decorate their paper with stickers.

Brenson pretty much only wanted to use the stars!

After everything was decorated, I hot glued the craft stick to the paper to make a flag! They turned out SO cute!

The Bs used their flags to help cheer on Team USA each evening :-).

Another day, I decided to break out the paint once again and make Olympic rings. For this simple project, the kids painted paper plates the Olympic colors.

I'm not sure what this look Brianna is giving is all about!

This was a pretty messy project, but it was sure fun :-).

After painting the first two plates, I decided that it might be easier to cut them into rings FIRST, then let the kids paint. It was much easier that way!

Working hard.

After all the rings were painted and dry, we cut slits in them and linked them all together.

We hung this in our living room until the Olympic games were over.

I had been wanting to try my hand at salt-dough ornaments during Christmas, but never found the time. So, I decided that one of our Olympic projects would be salt-dough medals!

Both of my kiddos LOVE helping me in the kitchen!

If you've never tried to make salt-dough, it is SUPER simple. We will be doing this again!

They both loved rolling out the dough!

Bren was so cute rolling and rolling. He thinks he's as big as Brianna :-).

After rolling out the dough, we cut circles with a jar lid. I had a ton of dough leftover, so I also cut some other shapes just to have on hand for a rainy day.

I put some designs into a few of the medals, but left others plain. After baking the medals and making sure they were nice and hard, I sprayed painted them gold. You can also use acrylic paint to paint them, but I didn't know that at the time. We put ribbon through the hole I had punched before baking them, and the kids LOVED their gold medals!

They actually still have their medals in their dress-up drawers and still play with them!

The next activity we actually did several times over the course of the games. I found a template (on Pinterest) for winter Olympic Bingo and couldn't resist printing them out! The kids love a good Bingo game!

Some of the pictures were kind of difficult for Brenson to decipher, but he caught on quickly.

Brianna takes her Bingo playing seriously :-).

I also found a template for an ice skate on Pinterest. I was not at all surprised that Brianna loved watching the ice skating, so she was thrilled to make her own skate. I printed the ice skate onto white cardstock, and let the kids decorate them however they wanted.

At first, they were satisfied coloring with markers.

But soon Brianna decided that she wanted to use glitter.

Glitter is a favorite around our house :-).

It took a while for the glitter to dry, so we took these photos the next day.

They both enjoyed their ice skates!

Most of these ideas were things I found on Pinterest, but I modified many of them to fit our needs. I love LOVE the age that my kiddos are right now. They enjoy just about any activity I plan for them . . . and they loved every single one of our Olympic activities! It was a great way to celebrate the games and learn a lot in the process!

Happy Olympic Day, Everyone! I'm going to try (really, really hard) to make my blog a priority again. I have lots of fun photos and stories to share :-)!