It’s an exciting day for our school, community and country. Today is the opening ceremonies for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver! We kicked off the celebration with a school wide assembly and mini-Olympic events that involved students of all ages and even teachers. The stands were filled with a sea of red and white and O Canada was sung probably the loudest and proudest that we’ve heard this year. The next few weeks we’ll be keeping track of Canada’s participation and celebrating our countries achievements one step at a time.
Olympic fever has been building in our community for a while. In November we were one of the stops for the Olympic Torch Relay on Vancouver Island. Intermediate classes in our district were bussed down to the Torch Ceremony Celebration to watch the final torch runner, on this leg of the relay, light the main torch cauldron on the celebration stage. This was Bent Harder, an 83 year-old man who has contributed countless hours of volunteer service to local programs. After his arrival, we also listened to a woman who as a 13 year-old girl had watched the first official torch run in Berlin in 1936. We couldn’t help but be inspired by seeing one torch run, let alone two! It was pretty amazing to be a part of it all.
Our school was actually connected to three Olympic torch runners! That’s right, three! Our former principal and two parents of students were all selected for different legs of the relay. We wondered on average how many runners were connected to other schools across Canada because three seemed to be quite a privilege.
The Olympic women’s hockey teams from China and Sweden practiced and played in our local arena last weekend and several countries (upwards of 10-12) have been training on our local mountain as it has the closest conditions to Whistler. The lack of snow on Vancouver’s local mountains has prompted a restriction on training runs which has led more Olympic teams over here than originally expected. This included athletes who were competing in alpine, nordic, and free-style skiing as well as the biathlon.
We also found out that our blogging projects were recognized in the UBC Global Minds Challenge. This is a global competition and showcase of K-12 projects that highlight themes of sport, culture, sustainability and/or global citizenship. All submitted projects were reviewed by VANOC (Vancouver Olympic Committee) representatives on a panel of judges and we received a recognition certificate and a class collection of stickers, pins, and other Olympic information from the Education division of the 2010 Olympics. That just added to our Olympic spirit!
Needless to say, we are looking forward to the next two weeks! Go Canada go!
image: Ilanaaq, the inukshuk – 2010 snow sculpture by Tim in Sidney through Creative Commons license