Tap into student interest in athletic competitions with these sports themed lessons.
Creating and Annotating Maps
Our Interactive Atlas (also available in Spanish) is a great tool for project-based learning. Using our map and annotation tools, students demonstrate mastery of content while engaging their research and writing skills. Consider the following sports related activities:
- Athletes from Around the Globe. Have students create a map documenting what they learn about athletes from around the globe. Students can put a flag on the country and open a text box to write a brief description of an athlete or sport to highlight what they've learned from sports coverage.
- Medal Count. Use the Atlas as a scoring guide to document the number of medals (color code for gold, silver, and bronze) won by various countries in sporting events.
- Where to Next? Track temperatures and snowfall to predict countries that would be the best locations for future winter sports competitions.
The Interactive Atlas allows students to create customized maps.
Sports History
Our interactive, student-led lessons are a wonderful resource for studying the history of sports.
- Learn about the athletic prowess of the ancients with Ancient Greece: Minoan Civilization.
- Learn about the origin of the modern-day marathon race -- the Battle of Marathon in the Greek and Persian War -- with our Ancient Greece: Melian Debate lesson.
- Our 1936 in Review lesson explores the Olympics hosted by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in which a U.S. track star, Jesse Owens, won medals and blew apart Hitler’s Aryan race propaganda.
- American Athletes of the '20s and '30s investigates famous athletes from the period. Students examine the achievements of the athletes and the adversities they overcame to determine the greatest athlete of the era.
- Learn about the Arab-Israeli hostilities that fed the terrorism at the 1972 Munich Olympics in The Middle East: Suez Crisis.
Sports Data
Data Depot provides over 150 data sets for student use.
Our Data Depot -- a repository of clean, ready-to-use datasets -- can provide hours of athletics analytics fun. Get students thinking critically about topics like these:
- Physically Active Students
- High School Athletics Participation by State
- High School Athletics Participation Totals
Also, answer the question "when are we ever going to use this?" by using the medal count to create histograms in Graphing One-Variable Data, a lesson from our Algebra 1 Course.
The Science of Sports
From figure skating to snowboarding, sports provide opportunities to discuss many scientific concepts. Draw connections with our interactive virtual labs (VLab), lab tutorials, and coding challenges.
Virtual Lab: Free Fall
- VLab: Linear Motion
- VLab: Free Fall
- Rolling Friction and Surfaces (coding connection!)
- Structure & Properties of Water
- Lab: Energy "Losses"
- Lab: Motion & Friction
Exploring Poetry about Sports
Yes, we have something for you too, ELA teachers. We have an entire series devoted to Exploring Poetry about Sports.
South Korea
Is South Korea a popular tourist destination? Analyze U.S. Air Passenger Travel Departures, which show the number of people traveling from the U.S. to different countries (including South Korea) between 1975 and 2015.
Enjoy the games.
