Ticia Messing: How to Create a State Study for Little Guys

Ticia blogs at Adventures in Mommydom. She home-schools her three kids. Her boys are 5 and in kindergarten. Her daughter is almost 4, but thinks she’s 5. She used to teach elementary school, but came home to be a Mom, and now teaches her kids at home. Ticia and her children enjoy reading books, making crafts, and all around having fun.

Ticia_Messing_Pic1.jpgTo start teaching my kids about the United States I got them familiar with the concept of different sizes of locations. To do that we read the book Me on the Map (hyperlink goes to the activities we did), which I love.
 
We started with our home state of Texas.  I firmly believe that kids are incredibly self-involved and they will remember more if you stick as much as possible to what they know. I thought about what I thought would be important for a little kid to know about Texas and I decided I wanted them to know about our state flower, some of the local animals, and the state symbols.  If I had been able to find an age-appropriate book about the Alamo I would have included that, but I couldn’t find one.

Ticia_Messing_Pic2.jpg As we progressed on to different states I looked at each state based on how I could get a hook in for my kids.  So, the next state we studied was Wisconsin, because their Dad grew up there. After that we studied California, where I grew up. And slowly we moved to different states for different reasons (other family members, we had traveled there, etc.).

Continue reading Ticia’s full post on her blog!
http://adventuresofmommyness.blogspot.com/

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