50 State Study: Pennsylvania

Happy 4th of July!

As many people said, it only seems right to write about Pennsylvania on the 4th of July, and goodness me is there ever so much to learn about in this state!  Our activities only barely scratched the surface.

Activities to do:

Reenact the Battle of Gettysburg with paper soldiers (probably my boys favorite activity)

Berenstain Bears are from Pennsylvania, so you could do any of a number of ideas, my activity was rather blah, but I found some fun website to check out:
Official Berenstain Bears website, PBS Berenstain Bears website, and finally the Random House Berenstain Bears website.   I'd love to see any of ya'lls activities for them, so feel free to link those up too.

Fireflies are the state insect, and we did two things with this, first a science experiment, and then read "F is for Fireflies," and drew pictures of things we do during the summer (see picture at left).

Hershey chocolate is from there, so we read and followed along for chocolate fractions.  If your kids aren't up to fractions yet, there are a whole list of Hershey's math books to read and have fun with.

We made egg carton Liberty Bells, which the kids all thought was quite fun.

We read about Ben Franklin and his many inventions and what we still use today, and drew pictures of that.  Unfortunately the book I wanted was checked out so we didn't get to replicate any of his experiments.

The most popular activity with the girls was making handkerchief dolls like the Amish had, and Princess carried hers around for days.

One of my favorite books was about Valley Forge.  It showed great depth and the illustrations were wonderful.  The book also had some great comparisons to make to the story of Hanukkah.





And here's the rather long list of things I didn't even get to touch on in the two weeks we studied Pennsylvania (and I'm sure those of you who live there can tell me and share posts with me about many more):

Crayola, Gettysberg Address, any of Ben Franklin's experiments, the banana split was first made there, more about Philadelphia, William Penn, more about the Amish, and the list just goes on and on.

Here is what our lapbook pages looked like, for those who are curious:

Sorry guys, in all of the craziness of summer I almost forgot the linky!

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