Kids Wednesday: Learning the States

We decided that one of the things that we were going to learn this summer was the states.   I found a 50 Great States book at the dollar store when we were there looking for some other entertainment when we were out of town.  I was glad to get this because it had a lot of information in it but it was easy to read!

I found a really neat sheet where I could print out a bunch and we could do one for each state on Teachers Pay Teachers.  It is really great because it uses a lot of practice writing.  There are some things that the kids can cut and paste on the side and then other information that they can only find in books or on the Internet.  It will make for a really detailed research project.

There were some sheets with basic information about the United States to make a very complete state book.  There was a coloring page with United States Facts.  There was also United States Symbols pictures that you could have the kids color and cut to make into a book.  We started with the cover and my son had a lot of fun coloring all of the states.  This cover printed portrait and not landscape on the paper so it looked a little different on ours.  The other sheets in the packet are great cut and paste sentences that your child can put together in the correct order and glue on then draw a picture up above for what it represents.

There are a bunch of coloring pages out there to choose from whether you want to do the state bird and the state flower (here) or you want to do a picture of the state (here).  There is another one that is more like a worksheet that has the outline with the state capital for the kids to label the capital (here).  I am using Virginia as my example because that is where we are located but there are ones for all 50 states if you are going to study a specific state.

There is a picture of all of the state flags which you can print and cut and paste on to the final sheets or just use to match with the names of the states in a matching game.  I used the one from wikipedia because they were a good size for what we were looking for and had good color.  I was surprised how few state flags I knew when I looked at them!  If you want more information on the state flags, there is an activity here.

We did the state birds from wikipedia too but there was some that didn't match our book and other information that we found.  In addition, there was a funny picture of the Baltimore Oriole.  Instead of the bird, they had the baseball mascot!!  It made me laugh but I also wanted to get the picture of the actual bird so I started to look for another list.  I found this list with picture that I liked a little better so I saved those to print.

The other thing that we need to complete our sheets was the state flower.  There was one on wikipedia which was very detailed.  But I decided that I liked this website because it was easy to download by copying to a word document and saving it to my computer.  There was the name of the state and the flower with a picture of the flower.  I love dogwoods which is the Virginia state flower.  It was really nice flower that we had in our front yard of our house so we used them for the design on top of my wedding cake!

Virginia American Dogwood(Cornus florida)

We also have lots of puzzles of the United States which we added to with another puzzle from the dollar store.  My son did this one day mostly by himself and it was a pretty big puzzle.  He was very proud!

We also used the wooden puzzle and floor puzzle through our studies.  It is always great to keep things around that get used over and over for different educational entertainment.

The state book is going to take us a long to time to get together but we are working on it and hope to get lots of it done this summer.  We started finding some new books at the library that we really liked and we picked up each one as we saw it so that we could learn a little more about the state and fill in the information to complete our book.  I hope that you have fun putting together your own state book and enjoy lots of the learning with fun mixed in!!!