Geography Continued - USA

This was our last week of Geography/Culture since it was just following President’s Day our theme was the United States.

Our first day this week wasn’t as effective as I had hoped.  So we switched gears day two and did a lot more gross motor and group activities.  This made a huge difference!

Some of our activities this week included:

• Puzzles
• Board Game (we played candy land, just to reinforce turn taking, they loved this)
• Reading time; ‘How to Make an American Pie’, ‘George Washington’, ‘Circling the Globe: USA’, ‘If you give a Pig a Pancake’ (Our letter the second day was P)
• O is for Olympics, we talked about the Olympics going on right now, the kids painted the olympic rings
• Cut, pasted and painted an American Flag
• Made Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty “masks”
• Played games using US money
• Made personalized coins/money
• Made Bald Eagles

Also for day two because I really wanted to switch things up and be more effective I got a “story time” kit from the library.  This had a flannel board and pieces as well as a list of different movement activities, songs and games.  This worked really well.  It kept all the kids engaged the entire time.  I will definitely be doing that again.

 Doing a U.S. Puzzle.  The kids did well identifying the country and state we live in.

Building their ‘masks’.  They all cut out their own stripes (Uncle Sam) and spikes (Lady Liberty) and glued or painted their masks.  

 Our cute Uncle Sams and Lady Liberty

 Painting the Olympic rings for the letter O

 Cutting and Pasting for the American Flag.  That cute Riley would cut all day!

Hand print painting for the stripes.  Dax and Adam loved this.  Clean Riley and James were not thrilled about getting their hands messy.  James was so upset about doing this Dax offered to do James’ flag too.

We looked at all the different US coins.  We talked about the different presidents on them and how they all have different names and different pictures on the back.  Then I had the kids stand in front of their coin (they all selected the color they wanted) while the other kids took turns holding a flash light to get their shadow and trace their silhouette.  They actually did much better for this than I anticipated.

The kids then got to name their ‘money’ I love what they came up with...

 They also got to color whatever they wanted for the back picture of their coin.  Adam drew “pyramids” James drew “the hoover dam” (he just went on a tour a couple days before and has been a little obsessed since), Dax drew a rainbow and Riley drew “flowers”.

Finally we talked about our national bird and the kids built these bald eagles.