The History of Curling

The History of Curling

The History of Curling
Reading Level

	edHelper's suggested reading level:	grades 5 to 7
	Flesch-Kincaid grade level:	5.64

Vocabulary

	challenging words:		bearing, membership, demonstration, imagine, maintain, traveled, section, equipment, member, during, early, channel, settled, standard, itself, since
	content words:		Middle Europe, Duddington Club, Royal Caledonian Curling Club, North America, North American, Lawrence River, Olympic Games, Olympic Sports

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The History of Curling
By Jane Runyon

¹     Imagine that it is a very cold day in winter. Snow is everywhere. The river near your home is frozen solid. Winter lasts for a long time where you live. You and your friends find any game you can that can be played on the ice. Someone finds a rock on the bank of the river. It has been smoothed and rounded by the action of the water around it. Your friend picks up the rock and slides it across the ice. It makes a grinding sound as it twists and turns on the ice as it glides. Pretty soon, several of you are sliding the rock across the ice to see how far it can go. Then someone draws a circle on the ice. Now, you and your friends try to see who can slide the rock into the target.

²     That may not be exactly how curling began, but historians believe it was pretty close to that. The disagreement comes when you try to find out just who the first curlers were. The people of Scotland are sure that they were the first people to try their hands at this winter sport. You get an argument from the people of the Netherlands.

³     Two oil paintings from about 1565 show people skating on the frozen canals of Holland. Some of the people look as if they are playing a game with pieces of iron with handles and brooms. That's just what you need to have a curling match. The Scots counter this argument by producing a stone bearing the date 1511. This stone that the Scots maintain is the earliest curling stone was discovered when a farm pond was drained.

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