Let’s Explore Alaska!

September 8, 2026

Today we studied our second state in our project, Alaska! I noticed our local library didn’t have a lot of books about Alaska so I supplemented with YouTube videos and resources that had information on all the states, not specifically Alaska. One of our favorite parts of the lesson was when we watched a time lapse of the aurora borealis and then watercolored our own night skies!

I think since we had such an engaging craft to go with our lesson, our state page didn’t get as much color as it did last time.

Rutledge noticed the flag had a pretty minimal and unique design and the fact that interested him the most is that it’s the BIGGEST state in the US!

Nat Geo Kids has a state song for Alaska featuring the state bird, the Willow Ptarmigan!

I searched the most popular places to visit in Alaska and one that came up repeatedly was Fairbanks to see the northern lights. Naturally I was inspired to create a watercolor representation of this beautiful display of light!

Here’s how we made our northern lights artwork:

First, you’ll tape down your watercolor paper. (you definitely want to use watercolor paper for this project) Then you’ll wet your entire page. Next you’ll add paint to the water on the page- this is called “wet on wet” painting. Using a wide brush, do strokes of dark purple, deep blue, and vibrant green across the whole page in a wave like pattern from left to right. Be sure to fill in the whole page. Then, allow the page to fully dry. Once the page is dried use a smaller rounded brush to paint white lines (acrylic paint works well for this) across the sky. Then, quickly before the paint can dry, use a wide brush to pull the wet paint up to create that reflective light look.

To finish off the painting part of the project you can “flick” your brush to throw specks of white paint in the sky like stars. To complete the project use black paper to create a scene silhouette. You can cut out trees, mountains, hills, houses, animals, etc.

After your art, you may want to “visit” sights around Alaska. These are the main ones that popped up for me when I did a search in preparation for our lesson today: