ABC and 123: A Learning Collaborative: Teaching with Ticia: South Carolina and New Hampshire

Monday, November 7, 2011

Teaching with Ticia: South Carolina and New Hampshire


Both South Carolina and New Hampshire were a bit of a struggle for me because my library had dribs and drabs of books, but they came in over the period of two months, and I couldn't do our studies that way, so they do not neccessarily have the best lapbooks, but there are some interesting activities.
South Carolina:

I'm going to go through this in order of the ones I found to be the best books:


Ron's Big Mission- This was one that came in later, but I wanted to be sure and include it because it is very well done and talks about segregation in an appropriate way for young children.

After reading this book about Ron McNair, who grows up to be an astronaut for NASA, we tried to fulfill his childhood dream talked about in the book of designing airplanes.  My kids happily spent 30 minutes or so designing a very unflyable plane, which they tried to fly.



Shipwreck Search-The Hunley was the first submarine and was lost at sea during the Civil War.  This book talks about all of the things scientists and historians did to try and bring up the Hunley.

Our activity was to reenact the scientists finding it.  Buried in the bowl was a toy car, "the Hunley," and several other false objects.  The goal was to find the Hunley without ever putting their hands in it.

Another activity you could do is measure out the Hunley and think what it would be like to be on the sub.  It was very small and cramped and would be eye-opening for the kids to walk through.

Freedom Ship- No photographs because we mainly read it and looked at a map of that time.  I used the map from here, and we discussed how difficult it would be to sneak on board the ship and stay quiet.

Champions on the Bench- a great book for any kids who are baseball fans, and another great book on segregation.  The kids understood how the boys on that baseball team felt when they weren't allowed to play because of their skin color.  I felt that any activity afterwards would cheapen the impact of the book with my group, but it could be an excellent time to write or talk about how to treat others.


These two there were no specific books, though we did read Freedom Ship to go with Fort Sumter because they sailed past it.

Francis Marion was a Revolutionary War Soldier who fought with guerilla war tactics and drove the British soldiers crazy.  Disney did a very good mini-series on him in the sixties, which I linked to above.  It's well done enough that my entire group enjoyed watching it, and that includes my daughter at 4, all the way up to a 5th grade boy.

Both of these are important to South Carolina history, but MY library did not have any good books for them.

You can get the printables HERE.

South Carolina state symbols

If you have any suggestions of activities or field trips for South Carolina, I'd LOVE to see them because I feel we didn't give this state full credit because of what we had available at the time.

New Hampshire:

 



Granite Baby- this is a cute tall tale from the state of New Hampshire about some sisters who are larger than life and best at everything, except taking care of babies.

After reading the story we tried to carve something like they did in the book.  Except we carved ours out of soap which can be "carved" using soap knives.





Tuttle's Red Barn- is the true story of a family barn, that has been in their family for over 400 years.  It's a great way to introduce and teach timelines, and that is what we used this book to introduce.


Afterwards I had scanned a picture from each time period and they cut them out and put them on a sentence strip in order.



The Bear who Heard Crying- a "true story," according to legend about a young girl who was lost for four days and when found told about the 'big puppy' who kept her safe.

Afterwards I gave the kids a piece of green cardstock to draw a forest on.  I cut  four windows that can be opened and behind those four windows they drew different things from the forest and one of them held the bear and the girl.



This last activity has no picture, but would work very well in a classroom.  We read some of the potato books and talked about our favorite ways to eat potatoes.  I had gotten several people to share their favorite way to eat potatoes on Facebook, and we graphed it and answered several questions about it.  Obviously this would work very well in a classroom because you have a large group to query built in.

And finally we had the state symbols.

New Hampshire felt like it went better, but again it feels like we could have done more.  I probably will feel like that with any state we can cover in one week, though.



2 comments:

  1. This is a great post--thanks for the book and activity recommendations. :)

    ReplyDelete