Today we studied our first state in our line up for the year! We’re starting at the top of the alphabet with the A states and first up is, Alabama! It’s the “heart of dixie!” To begin I set out a collection of reference books I picked up from our local library. All I did was go to the state books section, grabbed 3-4 books and checked them out. Not a whole lot of thought. I figured we’d look through them together and combined with YouTube we’d have all we need!
The Alabama page has two sides and the front includes a place to find where Alabama is in a map of the whole United States. We also identified the capital of Alabama (Montgomery) and colored it in on the big map.
The front page has space to collect general information, things like year of statehood, most populous city, etc. However, my guy was ready to color so we flipped over to the back page to start learning fun facts about Alabama.
The state flower is the camellia and the state bird is the yellowhammer! He had fun looking up both of those from NatGeoKids and coloring them in.
Nat Geo Kids has a lot of great resources for state studies! They even have a (somewhat) catchy song for each state including facts and details about it.
Then we looked up a natural landmark in Alabama because it sounded interesting to my guy when we read through one of the state books I got from the library. We went on a “field trip” to see the Cathedral Caverns. I just looked up a video on YouTube and he enjoyed the quick over view and fun sights around this massive cave.
To finish up our lesson we collected the last of the facts for the front page of our Alabama study and then we used play dough to try and construct a replica of the shape of Alabama. He did pretty good! I think when we get to states with various terrain we may try to model the mountains, deserts, lakes, etc. To start though, this was great!
Gulf Shores
US Space & Rocket Center
Cathedral Caverns
Mount Cheaha
Capital City: Montgomery
I just did a quick YouTube search to take a virtual “field trip” to these places. Just search the area + “for kids” and you’ll typically find great family friendly resources. Alabama friends, feel free to chime in! What places would you say are a MUST see?
One of my favorite types of books our library has are the Discover America series from AV2 books. Some libraries maintain a subscription giving you access to a wide variety of resources for each individual state!
Next week we’ll explore ALASKA! Stay tuned to learn about our Alaskan exploration!
