Amused! They're Learning Geography from License Plates.
We went to a local amusement park for the day with my husband's side of the family and my boys spent a fun filled day playing with all their cousins, aunts, uncles and grandmother.
We had a great day with wonderful weather. But I must admit all day I was thinking about how we hadn't done any real schooling in over a week. I knew if I tried hard enough I could think of things they had learned about (like drag, speed, force, etc) and I'd be right, in theory, except all they knew was that they were having fun in an amusement park. They rode many rides multiple times and ate tons of junk food-- everything a perfect vacation day should include!
Then it hit me-- geography!
My boys learned about geography today.
We traveled through three different states. We saw many more licence plates-- three of them from provinces in Canada! My boys crossed off many more plates on their lists and pulled out the United States map trying once again to stump my husband on his state capitals.
When we spotted a plate from California my four year old said "wow! California?! They must have had a looong drive." Such a simple statement but it made me realize at only four he already knows that California isn't close to us.
They counted up the check marks and Ian and Alec realized they have almost half of the states crossed off already. They have started associating the pictures on the plates with the state names long before they can see the names written-- "Georgia, peach!" or "oranges on their plate- they must be from Florida."
We also pulled out all the quarters from my purse and started checking the backside of them looking to see how many states we had collected and the pictures shown on the back of those.
While my boys may not have learned where all the state are yet, they are getting very familiar with all the different names of states and have an approximate idea of where they are located.
We had a great day with wonderful weather. But I must admit all day I was thinking about how we hadn't done any real schooling in over a week. I knew if I tried hard enough I could think of things they had learned about (like drag, speed, force, etc) and I'd be right, in theory, except all they knew was that they were having fun in an amusement park. They rode many rides multiple times and ate tons of junk food-- everything a perfect vacation day should include!
My boys learned about geography today.
We traveled through three different states. We saw many more licence plates-- three of them from provinces in Canada! My boys crossed off many more plates on their lists and pulled out the United States map trying once again to stump my husband on his state capitals.
When we spotted a plate from California my four year old said "wow! California?! They must have had a looong drive." Such a simple statement but it made me realize at only four he already knows that California isn't close to us.
They counted up the check marks and Ian and Alec realized they have almost half of the states crossed off already. They have started associating the pictures on the plates with the state names long before they can see the names written-- "Georgia, peach!" or "oranges on their plate- they must be from Florida."
We also pulled out all the quarters from my purse and started checking the backside of them looking to see how many states we had collected and the pictures shown on the back of those.
While my boys may not have learned where all the state are yet, they are getting very familiar with all the different names of states and have an approximate idea of where they are located.
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