Postcard Geography Album: California, "The Golden State"
California is where my husband is from and where his family lives, so it is a state of importance to us. To introduce it a bit more, we had a Calfornia inspired lunch of Cobb Salad.
Students took turns coloring a state coloring page which included the state flower, the California Poppy; the state bird, the California Quail and the Golden Gate Bridge. It has a star for the state capital, Sacramento and also lists the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. With little pictures it notes the major industries of farming, vegetables and fruits, computers, factories and mining. It also has little icons for Sequoia National Park, Sierra Nevada Mountains, Sacramento River, San Joaquin River, and the Colorado River.
This is the postcard we received from California.
We glue everything on the scrapbook page except the postcards, which we tape in with one strip of transparent tape at the top, so that we can always look at both sides of them by just pulling the page out of the plastic protector sleeve and either just flipping the card or carefully removing the card and tape.
G is for Golden: A California Alphabet contains 40 pages of entertaining and educational facts about California - its natural history, social sciences, inventors, and even its forty-niners. On the T is for Television page, the reader discovers Philo Farnsworth, a 21-year-old farmer who gleaned the idea to transmit the world's first television picture by looking at the patterns in the rows he had plowed in his field. Another California first was the creation of the United Nations Charter, signed by representatives of 50 countries at the San Francisco Opera House in 1945. Readers of G is for Golden also learn about the world's largest find of Ice Age fossils at the La Brea Tar Pits, the 21 missions that line El Camino Real, Cesar Chavez's vision, and Rodia's Watts Towers. The series employs a two-tiered approach to reach all students from Pre-K through 4th grade. A rhyme for each letter of the alphabet captures the attention of younger readers, while older students read the expository text on the same page and gain a richer understanding of the topic.
Hop on over to Homegrown Learners if you'd like some ideas for California-themed books0r to Our Cup of Tea for lots more ideas for a California study.
