This week our state study took us to Arkansas. I have to be honest with you, this one was a hard sell. After exploring exotic locations like Alaska or the deserts of Arizona or the Grand Canyon, Arkansas looked a little.... flat. Never the less we determined to seek the sites and beauty of Arkansas through books and online resources. We were happy to discover there are a few really special places in this central southern state. As always we started by looking up basic facts about the state and found all of them (state abbreviation, year of statehood, capital, populous city, etc.) We also enjoyed exploring the state bird by listening to Mockingbird sounds online and watched a great video about apple blossoms (the state flower.)
This is the video we watched about apple blossoms. It goes into more than we really needed but the beginning part about the blossoms was great!
These state pages have been the best spine for our study! Each week I print the page for the state we’re learning about, grab almost every book at our library on the state were learning about, and do a quick search for videos to support our study too!
Coming in clutch, Nat Geo Kids has a video for Arkansas. My guy loves these silly videos and the fun songs that accompany them. I’ll link the video here.
It was the state flower that inspired our activity today. My sweet guy wasn’t feeling great with a low blood sugar so we decided to make it a collaborative project and we worked on it together. :)
We did a mixed media project using different art mediums. We used acrylic paint, oil pastels, and water color. We started by making very blobby pinkish blossoms. Then added a little red to give the blobs some depth and dimmension.
When the paint dried we used oil pastel to frame the blossoms and add details.
Apple blossoms have LOTS of leaves so we used watercolor to create lots of fluffy leaves all around the blossoms! These were a lot of fun and super easy to create! To finish it off we filled in the background with a pretty blue sky color.
After exploring facts about the state it’s fun to “visit” different places around it! Here are a few places we thought were interesting in Arkansas:
The Thorn Crown Chapel
(pc: trip advisor)
Crater of Diamonds State Park
(pc: trip advisor)
This park is the only place in the US where you can mine real diamonds!
Here are the online resources we used to support our state study on Arizona:
Facts and Info Websites/Videos:
The Apple Orchard is in Bloom!
50 Birds, 50 States - Arkansas
Click here to find the resource we’re using as the spine for this study:
