photo by zipckr www.flickr.com
The 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver is on everybody’s minds, and it seems like on everybody’s TVs. If you log on to Twitter or Facebook, tweets and status updates about the Winter Olympics are inevitable, and so we know our children and teens are watching and listening, too. As parents and teachers, how can we use these Winter Olympics as part of our sneaky teaching moments (when we are teaching our children something without them knowing it), and what can we teach them? Here’s a list I made:
*The most obvious is hard work and determination will get you far in life–whether you are an athlete or a small business owner. If you reach for the top and support that reach with hard work, you will get somewhere.
*You can’t buy your way to the top. I think Canada might be learning that the hard way. There’s been a lot of press about them spending millions and millions and millions of dollars to buy the podium at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver; and this morning on the news, I saw that the U.S. has 24 medals and Canada has 9. One Canadian reporter wrote an article and asked if the United States would let Canada “rent” a spot on the podium? 
I think this is the perfect lesson for children, teens, and adults to realize that money alone is not going to buy success, happiness, or gold medals.
*There’s more than just football, soccer, basketball, and baseball out there in the sports arena. Yesterday, I watched the most interesting Winter Olympic sport which basically looked like a huge shuffleboard game on ice and is called curling. Now, this sport takes completely different skills than football; and for some children and teens, it might be right up their alley. Maybe none of these Olympic events are right up their alley, but at least it can show them that there’s a big world out there past their high school community. On a side note, I recently wrote an article about teens and rock climbing and teens and Explorer posts. I had the same ideas about the big, old world out there when I was writing these articles. Make sure we let kids follow whatever interests and dreams they have–there’s probably even a group already out there for them to get involved in.
*Having pride in your country is good and important, but we have to have good sportsmanship and be accepting of everyone. Some athletes who lose don’t always show good sportsmanship. There’s been some smack talk from different athletes and fans surrounding these Olympic games. If your child or teen gets caught up, stop them and show them an example of someone who is positive like U.S. figure skater, Evan Lysacek, who won the gold medal last night and is under fierce criticism from the Russians. He said nothing but positive and nice things about his opponent Evgeni Plushenko on Good Morning, America this morning.
Here are a couple books to check out:
Maybe you’ve thought of some other things the Winter Olympics can teach our children. Please share these sneaky life lessons here!
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