Fourth Week in June ~Alaska State Study

Our second week of "Trekking Across the US" moved us to the state of Alaska.  We used the idea of flying on US Airlines from Alabama to the state of Alaska.  We talked about the things we saw while leaving Alabama (great review) and then some things we saw as we flew into Alaska.

I am in the process of making a laminated state map with velcro states to put onto it.  I will also be making an airplane to fly to the next state.  Hopefully it will be done by Monday.

We started out coloring the state of Alaska on the cover of our Alaska book.  You can download most of the book at the bottom of this post.

We then found Alaska on a map (I found a map with Alaska in the right place as they need to know where it is) and colored it blue, printed or wrote the state name, did a dot-to-dot of the outline of the state, and discussed and colored the state flag.  Below are pictures of what we did.

You can find the dot-to-dot paper here at Making Learning Fun.

 The older children cursive wrote the name of the state.  We talked about how the seven

little stars form the Big Dipper and the large star is the North Star on the flag.

We then talked about the state bird (Willow Ptarmigan) and state flower (Forget-me-not) and how dog sleds were the way of transportation but how and why snowmobiles have replaced the dog sled.  Below are pictures of the pages in our book and the activities we did.

When we talked about the state bird we put together an eight piece paper puzzle of the bird.  Many

of the younger children struggled a bit with the puzzle.  We then sponge painted a willow ptarmigan and

made a forget-me-not (see below).  Dog sleds was the other topic we covered.  We read the book

I made about dog sleds and then completed a color book (they traced the color word that was dashed

in the color the word was and then they glued the same color of dog print).  The older children did

this activity in cursive and rewrote the word on their own.

 Inuits and Inukshuk were the next two pages in our Alaska book.  Below are the activities we did.

 We talked about the Inuits and what is an igloo.  We made our own igloos cutting strips of

white paper into blocks and gluing them onto the igloo.

 We found out what an Inukshuk is and matched shadows of Inukshuks that you can find here and 

then we made our own Inukshuks that you can find here.

And we made our own Inuits.

Our next two pages covered Mt. McKinley and the Northern Lights.  Below are the activities we did.

 We talked about Mt. McKinley, matched some pictures of Mt. McKinley in our book, and

we drew our own Mt. McKinley.

The Northern Lights were a hit.  They loved looking at pictures of the Northern Lights and

then we chalked (wet the tip of the chalk in water and then draw on the paper... the colors

turn out wonderfully) our own Northern Lights.

Our last two pages were about Polar Bears and a review of what we learned.  Below are the activities.

 We talked about Polar Bears and did a tanogram bear (I just cut out paper pieces and had the

children glue them down) from here.

 I made a counting book in which they counted the number of polar bears and then colored the

right number with a yellow marker.

 My children love this activity... so I thought it would make a good review game... so they rolled and

graphed some of the things we learned about while studying Alaska.

Lastly, we drew and wrote (younger children dictated their response) of their favorite part of

Alaska.

I thought it was a fun week learning about Alaska.  They all enjoyed the activities and learned a few things.  Hope you enjoyed our unit too!  You can download most of my unit here.