Kansas Unit for homeschool geography
Hi, Future Ticia 2025 here, well actually current day because I’m rescheduling this to 2025. I wrote this way back in February 24, 2011, and things have changed just a little bit. Like when I first wrote this Kansas Unit we didn’t even link to the books, so it was just name a book title and good luck to anyone else finding the book. So, now I’m going back and updating this geography lesson so it makes sense with the rest of my United States Geography units. So enjoy this blast from the past where you get to see what we did back in 2011 and then what we did later on when we reviewed Kansas when the kids were much older.
For now I return you to Past Ticia 2011, and then I’ll pop in with NOW Present Ticia 2025:
(there are now affiliate links in here)
As I mentioned (I think, I know I did over at ABC & 123), we’re restarting our state studies with two other families, but I wanted to finish up posting about what we’ve done so far, before restarting it all.
This time, we’re going in order of the states entering the Union. So, on Wednesday (which will be yesterday for you guys, if I schedule this for Thursday), we’ll have studied our Delaware Unit. And the week after that, we’ll be going through our Pennsylvania Unit.
So, any suggestions for Pennsylvania and our New Jersey Unit would be much appreciated (I have some ideas for Pennsylvania, but none yet for NJ).
Kansas booklist
- Mortimer’s First Garden– which Batman just saw as I was entering these into the computer and took it away.
- Aunt Minnie and the Twister– which got a rare request to read again, it’s a funny story of a spinster woman who has adopted 9 nieces and nephews and what happens when a tornado hits her house and everything is topsy turvy. Very cute books.
- Twisted Tale– no picture of the cover, but it’s a super cute book about a family that goes through a tornado and how they have to solve the problem of their twisted up animals.
Misses
- That Dancin’ Dolly- Which seems so cute, but it didn’t quite work right, aside from the kids asking me to sing it as a song, because it’s a song, so I tried my best to sight read the music….. kinda Future Ticia 2025 will add, this book is no longer at the library and Amazon has no idea what this book is, so I can’t give you a link. Which is apparently not a problem because my kids didn’t like it.
- Gramda Essie’s Covered Wagon– It was a little long for their concentration, and it was more of a journey type of book, no real action for the boys. I might try them on it again in a few years. It’s an interesting story about a little girl and how she remembers all of her moving back and forth, and how much she had a hard time with that. I think that’s the other problem, it’s totally out of their frame of reference.
Well, that’s a quick overview. I’m off to take a walk with the kids, and then maybe when I get back write the rest of my posts for the week. That or go upstairs and work on some more painting. We’ll see.
Now Future Ticia 2025 will add in the books from when I made a NEW Kansas book list whenever we redid this. I have no clue when this happened because I apparently went on a picture-taking spree a year ago, and the original pictures I took were from 2024, and I know we didn’t study it then because the kids were gone…. Sigh…
- Kansas (a true book)– the generic book about Kansas, you know the one you use to write you book report in 3rd grade and then your Mom makes you rewrite it because you didn’t understand how to write the report.
- No small potatoes: Junius G. Groves and his kingdom in Kansas– I love this type of rags-to-riches story, as we get to hear how Junius moves from a slave to a sharecropper to a wealthy farmer. That’s quite a life.
- Wagon Wheels– The Muldie family moves into Nicodemus, Kansas, a town of freedmen living together. The story follows the brothers after their father has to leave. It’s an interesting, leveled reader that was a fun read.
- A girl named Dan– an interesting story of Dandi, called “Dan” who wants to be a bat boy for the local baseball team and how she fights to overcome the “boys only” rule. The story is fun to read and lets you see how not all girls have to be the same, some girls can enjoy sports.
- The Day of the Black Blizzard– A Dust Bowl era story of when a giant storm hits Kansas and how to children had to hole up and survive.
- Follow me down to Nicodemus Town– This book about Nicodemus town is a fictionalized version of the town from a few books earlier.
- Amelia Earhart– Since she was born in Kansas (need to double check this, but that’s the reason I put her on here), I put a few books about her on the list. This book is generically about Amelia Earhart, but it’s a level 1 reader, so not a lot of information, and what is there is fairly basic since it is made for younger kids to read.
- Night flight: Amelia Earhart crosses the Atlantic– This book focuses on her successful Atlantic crossing.
- Tornadoes– Gail Gibbons is a genius for nonfiction books, so of course, this book is awesome.
- Do tornadoes really twist? questions and answers about tornadoes and hurricanes-this is a lot of great questions kids ask about tornadoes, talked about in a high-interest way with some great pictures, so this was another great book to grab.
Kansas YouTube videos
I almost forgot to put these in. Are you ready for the wonders of the videos available for the United States?
There is no sarcasm whatsoever here.
You can’t see my eye twitch as I hear his overly cheerful voice tell me it’s time to watch another Homeschool Pop video.
I don’t know, but then there’s the mildly creepy Hey! Guess What group.
Sadly, we don’t have the rapping birds from Nat Geo kids.
Kansas Notebooking pages
First, Current Ticia 2025 says, this is what we did in the past.
Here’s what you see:
- On the left: meadowlark, buffalo animal report minibook
- Aunt Minnie and the Twister paintings (that’s what’s in the envelope)
- On the right hand side: sunflower paintings
- State symbols book (Printable is on the Subscriber page, JOIN MY NEWSLETTER)
- Twisted Tale (in the pocket are the illustrations)
- And on the bottom is the life cycle of a sunflower, which dovetailed nicely with this math activity (Current Ticia 2025 says, I’ve redirected that to this Seed sorting activity kit)
Current Ticia 2025 is going to upload the picture of the painting, because I deleted the Aunt Minnie post that was originally written as it just was not worth updating.
The Twisted Minne project was painted with cooked spaghetti noodles to create the twister, which my kids thought was the most amazing idea ever, but in the original post, I didn’t have the pictures, and I didn’t find the project photo until I came here. So very odd. And check out our wonderful sunflower projects.
Other things we did, but aren’t in the book:
Now, here’s our updated version, which I’ll arbitrarily say is from 8th grade.
We used the United States notebooking pages as our base.
And that’s our Kansas study……..
Now for some random lessons to check out
- By Seraph1888 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50692591
- By elisfkc from Orlando, FL, United States – Grinter Sunflower Farm, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62330847
- Originally published February 24, 2011
