This is a special edition of Teach Preschool in collaboration with bloggers from all over the USA. Each blogger is sharing a book about his or her own home state in support of the wonderful project: “Booking Across the USA” sponsored by Jodie of Growing Book by Book. Our prekindergarten class explored a few simple facts about our home state of Indiana…
We took a picture walk through two different books” “Indiana Facts and Symbols” by Bill McAuliffe and “H is for Hoosier: An Indiana Alphabet” by Bruce Langton. Both books were too complex for us to read-aloud to our students but they did offer lots of wonderful photos of landmarks and symbols that our prekindergarten students found interesting…
Both of the books had wonderful photos of Indiana symbols to promote discussion about where we live. When we asked our students to tell us where they live, most of our students could tell us the city they lived in but not the state. Mrs. Courtney helped the children pinpoint the state of Indiana on a simple map…
Indiana State Flag
Every state in the US has a state flag and we discovered that Indiana’s state flag is dark blue with a torch and lots of shooting stars all around the torch. Â The children explored the Indiana state flag a little more closely as they created their own Indiana State flag books…
To make their flags, the children drew on the torch and flames and then used glue and glitter to add the the stars…
Then the children filled their flag books with information about Indiana symbols to be taken home and used as conversation starters with their parents…
Indiana State Bird (Cardinal)
We focused our sensory play on Cardinals in wintertime. There is nothing more beautiful than a red cardinal on a snowy pine tree….
The tub was filled with fake snow (no real snow was available at the time), real pine branches and a few Dollar Store red cardinals (picked up during the holidays)…
The Indiana sensory tub was a big hit and what a great hands-on way to help our students remember that a Cardinal is considered the Indiana state bird…
Indiana State Flower (Peony)
Our students explored the Indiana state flower by making a sticky flower using silk petals that looked just like the Peony petals on the cover of our Indiana book and a few yellow pipe cleaners…
The children pressed the silk flowers down onto clear contact paper flower shapes any way they wished to do…
There were all kinds of interpretations to this process…
Once the children completed their sticky flowers, we hung them up in our window…
Other States…
Be sure to see what others did to celebrate their state – the list of participating bloggers is just below….
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Check out the participating bloggers for more fun adventures in Booking Across the USA below….