Some amazing kids have been been in the news recently. Here are two who have made big achievements in the sports world.
Lydia Ko recently won the Canadian Women’s Open golf tournament. It’s a tournament for female golfers–adult golfers. Ko, however, is just 15 years old.
Ko lives in Auckland, New Zealand (where she has lived since she moved from South Korea when she was six years old). Last month she travelled to British Columbia, where she faced professional golfers at the Canadian Women’s Open.
Here’s how the Globe and Mail newspaper reported Ko’s final hours in the tournament:
“After yet another birdie on the 15th (hole) — the toughest hole on the golf course during the tournament — the world’s best sensed it was over, and the 15-year-old had it.” (Globe and Mail, Aug. 27, 2012, by David Ebner)
Ko won the tournament by three strokes, to become the world’s youngest woman ever to win an LPGA Tour event. The glove Ko used in the tournament was sent to the Golf Hall of Fame in Florida.
Just about a week before Ko was making history in B.C., Annaleise Carr was making waves in Ontario.
On Aug. 19, she became the youngest person to swim the 52 kms across Lake Ontario. Carr is 14.
It was an incredible feat of athletic endurance that took more than 27 hours in fierce winds and saw her battling waves more than a metre high.
Toronto Star reporter Tim Alamenciak wrote a moving article on her achievement, including some details about her struggle against nature. (Read that article here.)
Carr has been a competitive swimmer since she was four years old. Alamnciak reports that she trained for hours swimming tied to a block with an elastic cord. The training helped her muscles “but also her mind, forcing her to work for hours without moving a centimetre.”
Carr’s hero is Marilyn Bell, who, at age 16 in 1954 became the first person to swim across the lake.
Carr’s swim raised more than $70,000 for cancer research.
CURRICULUM CONNECTIONS
By Jonathan Tilly
Writing/Discussion Prompt
Today’s article explains how both of these young women succeeded despite overwhelming odds against them. If you had to choose whose accomplishments was greater, what would you say? Why do you think so?
Reading Prompt: Demonstrating Understanding
How are the accomplishments of Lydia Ko and Annaleise Carr similar? How are they different?
Primary
Demonstrate understanding of a variety of texts by identifying important ideas and some supporting details (OME, Reading: 1.4).
Junior
Demonstrate understanding of a variety of texts by summarizing important ideas and citing supporting details (OME, Reading: 1.4).
Intermediate
Demonstrate understanding of increasingly complex texts by summarizing important ideas and citing a variety of details that support the main idea (OME, Reading: 1.4).
Grammar Feature: Prepositions
Today’s article contains many prepositions. A preposition is a word that tells a relationship between a person, place, or thing (noun) and another word in the sentence. Writers use prepositions often to tell location and relation. The most common prepositions in English are: about, above, across, after, against, along, among, around, at, before, behind, beneath, between, by, down, for, from, in, into, near, of off, on, over, through, to, toward, under, until, up, upon, with.
Challenge a friend or an adult to see who can write a single sentence with more prepositions in it.
