States & Regions

I am LOVING teaching 2 classes of Social Studies this year!! In 5th grade, we learn about American History...but we start the year with States & Regions. I wasn't too impressed with the material I had to pick from so I decided to make my own. We just completed a 5 (almost 6 week) unit about the 5 different regions and finished with a big research project about a state. I can honestly say, from start to finish...this was SO MUCH FUN! 

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I just uploaded my unit to my TpT store for you to check out, but I wanted to explain how I used all this in my classroom. I started off by contacting each states tourism department and requested a free travel brochure for each state. I have a crate in my room that I store all of these in. (Except Connecticut who is the only state to go paperless) Then I checked out all of our State Books from the Library and stored them on a cart in the back of the room. Finally, I found maps and a few websites that I made available to my kids. I kept all these on hand throughout the duration of the unit. 

Week by week we went through a region of the US. Each region had their own journal pages my kids added to their SS Journals. I decided to set up my room in stations and my kids used the resources I listed above and moved around my classroom to find information. It took about 2 class periods for them to get through the stations and find the information. As they finished, I gave them the Region Word Search for that week...and they loved those! 

At the beginning of the week, we talked about the states in a particular region, and we labeled them on our Study Guides. These are not mine, but I wanted to link them as a resource if you'd like to use them too.  They come from Teacher Vision are are free! Just do a search for each of the 5 regions and you'll find them all! I also used this same page as weekly quiz. 

Finally, to culminate this unit, we did a big State Float Project. I knew I didn't want to do a research paper. Let's face it...I always hated writing them myself, so I wanted to make this fun. I created an A-Z State Floats Notes packet for my kids to turn in as their research. For each letter of the alphabet, I came up with something I wanted them to research. {Examples: C=Capital, H=Historical Event, L=Landforms} My kids really seemed to enjoy this type of research and I enjoyed grading it! The other part of the unit was to construct a State Float (like a parade float) I had seen these projects floating around on Pinterest and knew I wanted to try it out. They turned out so cute!!! We set them up on display in our Science Lab for a few days and let other grades walk through and check out our floats.

 

        

I've just had so much fun teaching this over the last 5-6 weeks and wanted to share what we've done! :)

If you are interested in implementing a States and Regions Unit in your classroom, head on over to my store and get your very own! :)