Mom Is Teaching

Last week I took some of the facts out of the post and wrote them on an index card.  I hung them on the fridge with Walker’s site words for the week and was totally surprised with both the 3 year old and the 5 year old knew many of the facts that I really felt like were too old for them to understand.  So, here we go, with the facts for week two.

Starting with Olympic Facts, since we are nearing the close of the 2008 Summer Olympics.

• he word “gymnasium” comes from the Greek word gymnos, which means naked. In ancient times athletes practiced in the nude to the accompaniment of music. They also performed naked at the Olympic Games. Women were not allowed to participate or even to attend as spectators.
• A Chef won the first Olympic Games in 776 BC. The race was the equivalent of a 190 meter or 208 yard dash.
• Three continents-Africa, South America and Antarctica-have never hosted the Olympics.
• The youngest ever Olympian was Greek gymnast Dimitrios Loundras, who competed in the 1896 Athens Olympics at the age of ten.
• The Olympic Games is the largest single broadcast event on Earth, reaching more than 3.5 billion people in 220 countries.
• The last Olympic gold medals that were entirely made of gold were awarded in 1912.

Social Studies Facts

• Obama has chosen a running mate.  Do you know who it is?
• The Labor Day holiday as we know it grew out of the efforts of labor unions over a century ago. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, records indicate the holiday was first proposed in the late 19th century. Two men are credited with the original idea: Peter J. McGuire, a co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, and Matthew Maguire, a machinist and secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York.
• One evening in 1937, RuthWakefield was making butter cookies and thought she would make them all chocolate instead. She cut a bar of chocolate into tiny pieces and added them to the cookie dough. She thought that the chocolate would melt completely and she would have chocolate cookies. When the cookies came out of the oven, the chocolate hadn’t melted at all! Instead, the “chocolate chips” had kept their form.

Language Fact:  The Rule regarding the use of the letters “i” and “e”.

• “I” before “e” except after “c” or when sounded like neighbor and weight. 
• The Exception to the above rule are these:

Isn’t it WEIRD at the HEIGHT of his success, the FINANCIER could NEITHER SEIZE a bit of LEISURE nor afford a FOREIGN trip.