Hello all I got a solid 2 months using the Olympics in all my classes at all levels. I started with a picture of every sport involved that I easily googled . I would show a picture of say a swimmer doing the backstroke and then the same picture with the word BACKSTROKE superimposed using PPT in a second frame . By doing that I had all levels of students familiar with the name for all sports involved.
Then when the opening ceremony happened it completly overshadowed the games themselves. It was easy to do a 2-3 hour class just showing the awesome pictures of all the scenes in the ceremony. Most importantly I was able to get the students using superlative synonyms based on every slide from PPT. In the end it was unanimous that we decided to coin new words using BEIJIING or a derivative and then shortening any of the thousands of synonyms that meant "better than great: like "JINGTASTIC" Beijing and fantastick since we really could not decide on an existing superlative that actually described the greatness of the ceremony My best line was WWOWWWWWWWW in a deep bellowing voice. We always started the class discussing each persons highlight of the previous days games most memorable event.Like Phelps medal drive etc. Its too bad we couldnt have the Olympics year round , what great material it provided. I also in more advanced classes taught words associated with a production of that size,Costume designers, Choreography,musical director etc.