Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Our State Study

This year as we study Early American History with Adventures in My Father's World we are also doing a state study. Yes, there is one with Adventures but it was just so boring so we came up with our own.  We spend 2 days on each state. 

My 2nd grader has her own notebook that is for our history and geography.  I'm not sure why I didn't take a picture of her notebook.

We have a United States Map in the front of our state pages.  When we "visit" a state, it gets colored in.  It looks like we still have a long way to go.



Next is our notebooking pages about the state.  This page is on Georgia, our first state to study.   I use mini post-it notes on the first page to mark each state for easy reference. There are a lot of great state study pages for free.  This Squidoo Lens has alot of great options.  The one I used is the last notebooking page set "Two Page State Layout".
This is Page 1.  You can use this set for any state.  Instead of getting her to draw and color the state flag I used a great product that I'll tell you about a little later.

Page 2.  This is for Tennessee.  We actually got to visit Tennessee on a recent family trip.  While we were there we visited the Belle Meade Plantation in Nashville (see the pic).  We used the brochure to enhance our page. 

State Coloring Page.  There are lots out there.  You can google "Mississippi flag coloring page" or whatever state you're studying and get several great options,  but these are my favorites.


Another great coloring page.  My Kindergartener loves coloring pages and it makes it more bearable for her who finds this type of study very tedious.  Again you can google this, "Alabama State Coloring Page" and get some good options.  Here is the one I use.
Pictured above are our state study packs.  Each bag has a printable element to complete our state study.  Bag #1 State Seals; Bag #2 State Birds and Flowers; Bag #3 State flags.  Our state notebooking pages requires all of these and I made it easy for my 2nd grader to be able to just open the bag she needs, cut out the specific state and paste it onto the notebooking page.  NotebookingPages.com has a great product for this.  I like the convenience of having this already printed out and ready to use.  For the label I just cut out the label for the first page of each set and package taped it onto my bag.  Easy Peasy.  We kept the bags in the front pocket of our 2" think 3 ring binder.

For facts and information my favorite resource is America the Beautiful, third series from Scholastic.  Each state has it's own book and they are expensive ($30 EACH!!).  I would just plan ahead and request them from my local library.  Don't worry, if you're library doesn't have this set, there are plenty of great reference books out there to choose from.  You just have to do some research.

So far we are really liking this set up.  I hope I've inspired some great ideas for a future state studies.

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