Weekly Wrap Up – The States

I had in my (very loose) master plan for this year to start studying the individual states of our country. We’re currently participating in a postcard swap and we get one postcard a week. We’re working through the alphabet and we received the Maine postcard last week. I want to use them to start a scrapbook of sorts for our states study.

Fast forward to one seriously cool birthday gift and we’ve jump-started our state study this week. This Melissa and Doug License Plate Game is such a great learning tool AND you can’t drop any of the pieces, they stay attached to the board. The board has a map as the base, and then example license plates that rotate on top. When you see a car with the license plate, you flip that piece and that state and capital are listed on the reverse side. It is a brilliant car game. We were so excited to be able to add this to our travel kit.

We spent three days this week out looking for license plates around town. So far we’ve found 44 of 51 (the map includes Washington, DC) plates. I must admit, we have sort of stacked the deck by spending some of our time driving through hotel parking lots. Tornado Boy definitely likes to be successful and this helps keep him engaged in the game. The good news is that there is so much to learn playing this game, there is far more to it than meets the eye. Here are some of the things that we’ve talked about during the past couple of days:

• The names and pronounciation of the states and capital cities.
• That Washington DC is the capitol of our country, an independent city and not part of any state.
• Mapping/direction skills. I used north/south/east/west directions to help guide Tornado Boy with locating states on the map.
• How “counties” work as some states have them listed on their plates.
• What an “antique” is, since we saw an antique vehicle plate.
• That laws vary state by state – some states require two plates – front and rear, some only rear.
• About some professions since we saw special license plates for things like farm use and government vehicles.
• Inconsistencies in the English language – like the pronunciation of Kansas vs. Arkansas.
• What some of the named areas of the country are like the West Coast, East Coast, New England, etc.
• How a ferry boat works when we saw a license plate from Hawaii. I was shocked that we saw one!
• How different states have different populations, which makes us more likely to see some states plates even if the state is far away. We’re also less likely to see closer states with small populations.
• We talked about the fact that Hawaii and Alaska are not placed in their true geographic position to save room on the board.
• We saw a couple of Canadian plates and we talked about their provinces, and how they’re similar to our states.
• We talked about geographic boundaries like the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and the Great Lakes.
• We talked about the state motto that some states have on their plates. My favorite is Washington, D.C’s – “Taxation Without Representation.”
• We talked about the fact that Alaska is a relatively ‘new’ state as shown on their 50th anniversary plate shown above.

How many toys can you say help you learn about language arts, math (probability), history, geography and government that a young child can really enjoy? Probably not too many. We had such a great time this week. I’m going to have to figure out a way to really celebrate when we find the rest of our missing states.

That was our major schooling this week. We still have a lot going on here with camp, Tornado Dad’s birthday and general summer activities. Tornado Boy and I were able to see a youth theater production of Willy Wonka that was a ton of fun. In true little boy fashion he told me that his favorite part was when Grandpa Joe burped the fizzy lifting drink. Such a boy!

If you’d like to see what else happened this week, check out the “Weekly Wrap-up” at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.