Showing Support for our Olympic Athletes!

We were all very excited when the postcards we designed arrived from the printer this week!  Students were eager to start drafting postcard messages, so we reviewed the message criteria we set with the Kindergartens and students started working on their writing.  Once students had a draft, they met with me to review, revise and edit their writing to ensure it met the criteria.  Then students wrote their final message on our beautiful postcards!  We've had a difficult time finding an address to send postcards directly to athletes, so we decided we'd use our Twitter connections to share the postcards.  We photographed each message and sent them to athletes on Twitter before mailing the actual postcard.  This way, we hope athletes will read them now even if they don't get the actual postcard until a later date.

Two postcards from our class were chosen by Olympic Lens to be featured on their Olympics website of photos!  It was so exciting to see my students' work shared with an even wider audience since they worked so hard on the postcard design, message writing and athlete research!

Postcards featured on Olympic Lens can be viewed here:

bit.ly/LTT2tQ  

http://bit.ly/1c8rnLY 

I'll keep adding more postcard photos here as well:

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Get your own

Olympics: Connecting with Athletes

Another important part of our Olympics inquiry has been learning about Canadian Olympic athletes.  Students were really excited to hear that locally-trained figure skaters, Paige Lawrence & Rudi Swiegers, would be going to the Olympics.  This was our first athlete connection in this Olympics inquiry, so we spent some time "getting to know" these athletes.  We checked out their Twitter account, watched videos of their qualifying performances and found out as much as we could about them.  Students requested that we send them questions on Twitter and we were thrilled when Rudi & Paige replied!  The students now refer to Rudi & Paige on a first-name basis and ask me daily "Can we watch some videos of Rudi and Paige?" or "Can we send Rudi and Paige a Tweet?"   The power of social media to connect us to others is incredible!  Since we're such big fans of Rudi & Paige, I've started watching for newspaper articles, videos and online material that relates to their Olympic journey and I've been saving them on my Olympics Diigo list to share with my class!

We've also made connections with some other athletes.  Mr. Obach (my husband and fellow teacher) sent us a link on Twitter that explained Hayley Wickenheiser would carry the Canadian flag at the Olympics.  Students really understood that carrying the flag would be a special job and my students were excited to find her on Twitter and send a Tweet congratulating her!  Mrs. Caldwell and the Oak Lake Kindergartens had made connections of their own with athlete Mellissa Hollingsworth and Tweeted us a video interview to watch. We are really excited to continue learning about Olympic athletes!