State Studies Unit 1 :: Week 4 Mid-Atlantic

This is an outline of our State Studies Unit 1 :: Week 4 Mid-Atlantic States. It is the fourth week of a 9 week homeschool unit. Read the State Studies Unit 1 Overview to learn more about the program and catch up on past weeks.

If you are following along at home, please note that there will not be a posting next week. We will be taking our Spring Break. We will continue the unit the following week.

Creative Commons Photo available here

Read about:
Pennsylvania, PA, Harrisburg
Maryland, MD, Annapolis
West Virginia, WV, Charleston*
in Our Fifty States and The United States of America.
*Southern State

Map: Add the 3 new states to your United States Study Map. We color Mid-Atlantic States dark blue and Southern States purple. They are colored coded on the quizzes. Number the states on the map to coincide with your state list (it gets too hard to fit all the state names directly on the map).

Color: Dover Coloring book page or State Information Page (coming soon) for each state. We like to add a couple of extra notes about the state in the margins. These are things that we learned about in our readings. Again we color Mid-Atlantic States dark blue and Southern States purple.

Community Enrichment Book: Boy of the Deeps

Community Life Book: Life in a Commercial City pages 1-17

Activity Page: It seems like these are popular. I will try to keep up with them and continue making them. This week it ties in with Boy of the Deeps is about Children at Work.

Read Aloud: Bud, Not Buddy chapters 1-4

Student Reader (3-4 grade): Lost Star by Patricia Lauber chapters 1-5

Narration: Complete a narration on either Boy of the Deeps or your student's daily reading from Lost Star. You can use the Reading Journal or any of the other free Journal Page that you would like. If you need help with learning how to incorporate narrations into your studies, I recommend the book The Complete Writer: Writing With Ease. The Reading Journal includes space for your student to choose several words from his reading that were unfamiliar to him to use as vocabulary words.

Copywork: Use sentences from Boy of the Deeps or the Bud, Not Buddy for copywork.

Art Project: Barn Star Designs/Hex Signs (directions coming soon)

Cooking: Make the recipe from The United States Cookbook: Pennsylvania Soft Dough Pretzels NOTE: We used kosher salt as our topping in place of the sesame seeds.

Picture Study: Choose 1 image from Come Look With Me: Art in Early America to study this week (we chose The Family Record).

Poem for Memorization: You will have four weeks to memorize "The Sandpiper" by Witter Bynner. Try to learn one stanza per week.

State Quarters: Another fun activity to add to this unit is collecting Quarters from all 50 states. You can display them in a quarter map.

Quiz: Study the 3 states and capitals you have learned throughout the week. Your student should be able to identify each state on the map, along with its capital and postal abbreviation. You can use your map or flashcards to study.
Week 4 Map Quiz

If you are following along with us and completing the State Studies activities at home we would love to hear about your adventures. You can leave a comment here with a link to your blog. If you don't have a blog or just want to share more photos we would like invite you to join our Wee Folk Art Homeschool Flickr group. Have fun!