Texas Our Texas! Freebie



 

Hey Friends,

Let's talk Texas... I think I have thought about Texas more in the last few weeks than I have in my entire life. I recently have driven across Texas and had a lot of fun and then drove back home which was not near as much fun. I have looked for Texas books only to come up empty handed and saw a Texas children's map and went to buy it and it was sold out. Needless to say, I am off to a great start!

 

 



So in the middle of all my internet searches and while I traveled across Texas, I had some time to think. And I decided to give my Texas Our Texas unit a bit of a makeover and it is now... Let's Celebrate Texas Our Texas Print And Go! And in that process, I have added over 60 more pages of fun. And I am so excited to take it to the classroom again this year and get ready for Texas Open House! The good news is that if you previously purchased this item you can have all 60 new pages of Texas sized fun just by re downloading. And because we are all so busy this time of year, print and go sounds pretty good to me too!

 

 

The cornerstone of this unit is the introduction to maps in Kindergarten, learning the state symbols, learning about Texas landforms and learning more about our great state! We had so much fun with this unit last year it was kind of hard to stop because we were on such a roll.

 

 

If you need a sample freebie page just click on the image above and it will take you to the free preview download! You have to download the preview to get the freebie!

 

 



Greetings From Texas!

Source: moodyscollectibles.com via Little Miss Kindergarten on Pinterest

Howdy Friends,

So much to share and so little time... Let's get to it. We have had a Texas sized heaping helping of fun learning about Texas, the symbols of Texas, learning some basic map skills and how ordinary people helped to shape our State.

We started out by learning about our flag. One of our favorite projects was painting flags to display for Open House. We learned that our State is called The Lone star State and that each color of the flag has meaning.

Red stands for bravery.

White stands for purity.

Blue stands for loyalty.

We were also able to compare and contrast the Texas flag and the American flag. We learned that both flags are made of the same three colors. Both flags have stars and stripes. We learned that the American flag has more starts and stripes than the Texas flag. We noticed that both flags were rectangles and they were the same size in our classroom. Once we started talking about flags we noticed flags around our school, in our neighborhoods and in the community.

Source: vintagetexas.com via Little Miss Kindergarten on Pinterest

Before we went on Spring Break we learned about Stephen F. Austin. He is the father of Texas. We learned how ordinary people, just like us, made contributions that shaped our State.

We learned where Texas was on our United States map and we learned how to identify the city we live in and the State capitol of Texas. We learned that the capitol was named after Stephen F. Austin. Naturally we were interested in where our friends and relatives were located on the map. We really wanted to know exactly where our pen pals were!

In my previous post I shared just how much I loved this book. And considering we were talking about Texas, we just had to create our own lesson for this because it was just to good to pass up. Like I said earlier, I went through several different versions of My Map Of Texas. I was super lucky that we had some rain days and I had a group of children that would try out just about anything for me. As I watched and listened to them as they worked, I was able to create version 2 then 3 then 4 and so on.

Here is version number 3. I have to admit some versions didn't even get a picture. As I was preparing for this post I realized that I did not have a good picture of our last version but I promise I will post it for you when we return from break because we were all just itching to try the new version!

So, after all of these versions what did we actually learn? We learned to create and interpret visuals, including pictures and maps. We learned that maps are pictorial representations of information and there are different kinds of maps.

We were getting ready for Texas Public School week and Open House so we had a few projects to complete. The hats are from our Take Home Project activity. The children take home cardstock copies of the hat and decorate it with their families. We had some creative hats this time around.

As with all of our projects the children try to match their own skin color with the paint, paper or crayons in the project. At this point in the year children can actually name their paint or crayon color!

 The multicultural paint sold by Lakeshore is my favorite because is has a great variety of paint colors and the paint names are common and familiar to the kids. It is always fun to see who is toast or cinnamon or toffee.

I was super excited to talk about the things we see in Texas especially our State Flower The Texas Bluebonnet. These is nothing that reminds me more of traveling across Texas than bluebonnets.

Source: google.com via Little Miss Kindergarten on Pinterest

We had to make our annual Texas Bluebonnets!

Here's my right hand man Diego. He is never far from my side. He's following my guided art instructions just smiling away. I wonder what he is actually thinking as I am saying blend, blend, blend, twist, turn, blend...

Before we left for our break we just had to have some Armadilly Chili because chili is the official food of Texas.

It was the best chili ever. And we learned that chili is much better shared with friends!

If you would like to follow along and learn about Texas with us just click on the image above to go to my store.

Happy trails to you until we meet again...

The Map of My Heart!

. I have to tell you that there was a lot of excitement in class when I put up the United States wall map. The children were very interested in finding out where they were on the map. I was surprised that many of the children had some prior knowledge about maps.

As you can see our wall map is literally a WALL map. In fact, the map is so big we had to use some map tools to reach some of the places we were discussing.

These pointers helped us a lot and kept the map clean from marks and smudges. The children were very interested in locating our pen pals on the map and figuring out where we were located. If you are looking for a classroom map, click on the image below for a very affordable one.

If you are looking for a book to help you explain the concept of a map, I found this book to be extremely helpful. It has great visuals to help young children begin to understand the concept of maps.

I was fortunate that my new Writing Curriculum came with the My Map Book. This book literally helped spark some of the best integrated Social Studies, Art and Language Arts Writing lessons in my class. These two books helped me keep the discussion of maps alive in my class.

After reading the book we all wanted to make our own maps!

I must have tried ten different versions of this project before I found what worked for us. First, I already knew we would struggle if I let the children draw the large heart for the Map of My Heart project and I wanted the heart to be as big as it could be, so I drew it and copied it onto cardstock. I wanted to have as much room as I could for the kinder writing because we all know that it can sometimes be rather large! The children wrote and illustrated what was in their heart with a Sharpie. We went through a few of these before it was over because sometimes the children wanted to edit. The edges and illustrations were filled in with markers and crayons because we were going to wash the entire map with watercolors.

The Map of My Heart project took time...lots of time. It was a very worthwhile project and one I would do again. We worked in small groups for this project and worked over several days. I learned that the next time I do this I need to be sure to have extra copies on hand and plenty of Sharpies available. I also learned that this was a great way to help me conference with my children about capitalization, spacing and letter formation. We needed this review. We also spent a lot of time planning our draft map and editing them as well. Each day we would look over the progress of our maps and that helped each of us as we evaluated each different map. The evaluation process was valuable because it gave us all tons of new ideas for our own maps!