Olympic Games Kid Style

What can I say, I love the Summer Olympics. I always forget how much I love them until they start. But after about the first ten seconds of the opening ceremony I am hooked, completely glued to the television, the rest of the world disappears. But now that I have two little princesses, and a couple of lords and ladies at my house being glued isn't really reality anymore. But just because I can't watch the games 24/7 doesn't mean that I have to miss them. Several other mom's in my kingdom and I decided to create our own Olympic games.

Every Olympic games needs to start with an Opening Ceremony and Torch Relay. We had all of the kids create their own flags and torches. 

The flags were made out of construction paper, stick on foam shapes, paint, markers, crayons and the stick was made out of a pipe cleaner.

 The torches were made out of construction paper that we glued orange, red and yellow tissue paper to. We then rolled the construction paper into a tube and stapled it together. 

After our Opening Ceremony we "let the games begin" and had different events at each neighbor's house. Event's included:

Racing - for the racing events one of the older neighbor boys created a track in his backyard and organized different heats based on age. Another racing event we did at another neighbor's house was good old fashioned sack racing.

Other events included Fencing, or in our case Bunny Fencing. Bunny fencing is where you use a fencing helmet, tape some balloon to the top, and try to pop the balloons on your opponent's head. 

To tie in gymnastics one neighbor created an obstacle course that included balancing, jumping on the trampoline, and sliding down a slide to stick the landing.

No Olympic games are complete without swimming being represented. For swimming we had a water balloon toss. 

Unlike the real Olympics, everyone at these games wins a metal.

The metal was made using card stock that was cut into circles with a hole punched at the top to run ribbon through and the Olympic rings were drawn on using blue, green, red, black and yellow markers.

I think the kids and the adults had an equally good time. This was an inexpensive day long activity that really introduced the Olympics to the little ones. In the words of Princess B, "this was the bestest day ever"