Olympics Update
Last week during the Winter Olympic opening ceremony, we never got around to making flags of the world out of Legos, but we did play Olympic Bingo. The board consists of pictograms of the Winter Olympic events. During the “parade of nations” portion of the opening ceremony, each country’s flag bearer is identified by name and sport. It’s that sport that you mark on your board. First one to get five in a row yells “Bingo!” As it did in 2012, this made the parade of nations a bit more fun for the girls, although they’re old enough now to find the opening ceremony uniforms worn by each country’s Olympians pretty interesting.
Here’s one of our Winter Olympic Bingo boards as a PDF and a Word document. To make different boards, just open up the Word doc and move the pictograms around.
My girls love craft projects, so, in addition to Bingo, we made Winter Olympians out of pipecleaners and popsicle sticks. (Spell correct is telling me that “popsicle” should be capitalized. Sorry Popsicle brand ice pops, you’ve lost that battle.) I got the idea from Pinterest, which is full of Winter Olympic craft ideas. Actually, that’s not true. If you search “winter olympic crafts” on Pinterest you get a ton of results, but it’s basically the same four or five ideas over and over. Regardless, I stocked up on pipecleaners and “craft sticks” earlier in the week, and the project went over really well with the girls. It helped that I picked up some new acrylic paint for the various snowboards and skis they created. Here’s one of Hannah’s designs:
By the way, the girls loved the Sochi opening ceremony. The lights, the dancing, the animation on the floor of the arena, the little girl who airwalked. Once our pipecleaner Olympians were done and Bingo was over, we curled up on the couch together and enjoyed the spectacle.
We also made Olympic cupcakes, again thanks to Pinterest. Pro tip: Cupcakes have to cool completely before you ice them, so if you’re planning to decorate cupcakes during an Olympic opening ceremony, bake them the night before. This was, I think, the first time I’ve ever made cupcakes, so we ended up decorating them the following day. Stretching out the Olympic fun over a couple of days worked out well, however. We went with two styles, one that I saw on Pinterest:
The second was Hannah’s idea:
Those are M&Ms, by the way, adding the color. Hannah also made a couple of cupcakes with “surprises” inside: M&Ms and sprinkles. Aside from the loss of structural integrity of the cupcake, her creations are pretty good. Although when I had a friend over that evening and told that the cupcake she picked for herself had a “surprise” inside, she looked very worried until I reassured her that it was only a little candy.
The girls are slightly more into watching the actual events this time around than with the 2012 London games. We’ve seen some figure skating and a couple of other sports. Mostly they like having the Olympics on the TV running in the background while they play with dolls and Lego Friends. They’ve spent hours playing together nicely over the course of the last week. It’s a joy to watch.