United States Travel Guide

Boy! The summer was too short!:) Of course, I have been playing and planning.:) We are off to travel the United States of America!

I found this great Yahoo group called Postcardkids. Once you join you can swap postcards with other home school families from around the US or the world. It is a lot of fun! We have almost all of the states in the US and for our geography lesson in school the kids are making a United States Travel Guide.

I made a sheet for each state listing what I thought was important information: statehood, famous people, fun things to do, etc... . On the upper right hand side of the page is a block for the child to glue a map of the state. On the bottom of the page are three blocks for the child to glue pictures of the state bird, flower and flag. I found a great US state flag poster at the local School Box store for $1.50 and the kids are just cutting out those flags and gluing them on to the page. For the bird and flower pictures, I used the web site 50states : http://www.50states.com/us.htm

http://www.50states.com/flower.htm

My plan is to have the kids glue the postcards that we have received from Postcardkids onto the facing page. While I was trying to figure out what to do with the states that we have not received postcards from, I decided to order free travel guides from the various states' tourism departments. I became addicted and ended up getting one from every state! Kids love mail, right? Besides getting the travel guide, we also are getting a free state road map. To find the travel guides, I just Googled "State Name Tourism". Here are a few of the sites I found:http://www.wyomingtourism.org/overview/Free-Wyoming-Vacation-Packet/61846

http://www.travel-vermont.com/common/request.asp?vwg09

http://www.exploreminnesota.com/travel/brochures/index.aspx

I figure that the kids can look through the guides and cut out the pictures that they like and glue them on the page with the postcard.

I also thought that it would be fun to include recipes from the different states. On the Yahoo Group, there is a file of different recipes from each state.

While looking for things to do related to US Geography, I stumbled on quite a few interesting sites. Maybe this can help anyone else narrow their search.

http://www.travelforecast.com/htdocs/cams.asp

http://www.squidoo.com/UnitedStatesUnit

http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/kids_usa.htm

http://www.classbrain.com/artstate/publish/

http://www.eduplace.com/ss/maps/usa.html

http://www.50states.com/bird/

http://www.prosserschools.org/walker/spelling/spelling.htm

http://www.kidzone.ws/geography/usa/index.htm

http://www.homeschoolinthewoods.com/WebLinks/weblinks-geographygeology.htm

http://www.travellerspoint.com/pcindex.cfm

http://www.notebookingpages.com/index.php?page=Free-Outline-Maps-Geography-Notebooking-Pages

http://www.squidoo.com/50statesnotebook

Hopefully, this will prove to be a fun and interesting way for the kids to learn geography. Who knows- maybe will will conquer the world next year!