Home Plate Fun: States and Regions Week 1

It is a crisp Autumn day this morning. The air is clear and the weather is good. We had a small amount of rain late last night into this morning. Rain is a good thing for our dry state right now.

I hope everyone is enjoying the cooler temperatures this time of year. This week we began our next Konos unit of Cooperation: States and Regions. This shall be a good and challenging one for our family. All of us need help in Cooperation currently. We are still learning how to work as a team rather than as individuals.

Our first major project for this unit was to create a large map of the U.S. This was no small task. My hubby picked up a large 4 ft x 8ft board from the local lumber store. He found one that was all white on one side and was thin. Not your typical plywood variety. This was a big help for us since we didn't have to prep it. Next, my husband and Chip drew a grid on a copy of a USA map and transferred a larger grid onto the board.

The next day, was the difficult task of drawing each state onto the map using the grid as a guide. After a short time Chip got the hand of it. It was a bit too challenging for Coco. She helped with a few of them but became frustrated. I gave her the job of erasing and taking a rag to wipe of the eraser messes. This task took us two days to complete.

After each state was drawn out I went over it with a black sharpie. I only had one sharpie. Chip tried to help out but accidentally drew on a grid line instead of a penciled state line. As you see in the picture Illinois and Indiana are now divided into two. Sadly, I became frustrated and upset with Chip instead of brushing it off and saying to him that paint would hide it. I'm hoping I can better guard my tongue next time.

We spent the rest of the day on Thursday painting each state. This was a time consuming frustrating task. I don't know if any of you have painted a large project with little ones. They had paint everywhere. On themselves and all places around the board. They would step into the paint and track it from state to state. Just like little puppy mud prints all on a clean floor.

Then there was the challenge of the wind that we faced that day too. We were just about finished with our painting when a gust of wind blew a bunch of dirt and brown grass on to our map. Ugh!! We tried to cover up the mess with more paint.

Here are some final pictures of our map. The things we learned from this endeavor was we are not professional map makers. There will be plenty of messes with kids and paint. All of us need to relax, cooperate and have fun learning. Maybe we can put these new observations to the test next week as we label the mountains, rivers and states next week. Lord willing, we shall see.