Home Plate Fun: States & Regions: Rocky Mountain Region

I apologize for not posting for some time. My kids got hit with the flu real bad around here. This years flu season is terrible. My poor oldest son was down with a high fever for just about six days. I was hoping to escape it this year but apparently it got the best of us this year.

I have some encouraging news to share with all of you in the homeschool community. The Governor and the President of the California Dept of Education announced their support for homeschoolers. They were not pleased with the court ruling and will do everything possible to protect homeschoolers in our state. Yeah for Homeschoolers!!! Keep praying to get the court ruling depublished. This could take months if not years to achieve through our court system. I pray that it be resolved sooner rather than later.

For the past two weeks we have been struggling to get our school work done. With sick kids it is always time to take off the teachers cap for the day and allow Mom to Mommy with love and comfort.

These two weeks we learned about the Rocky Mountain region states. States such as Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, Utah and Nevada. They learned about the animals that live in that region and how to track animals in the wild. They learned about Smokey the Bear. I had them color some pictures of him and I read a comic book their grandparents picked up for them on their travels. It was a great little book on the history of Smokey the Bear and how he got his name. I never knew that Smokey was based on a real bear. I even found some video clips online of some old Smokey the bear movies. The kids and I had a few laughs and it was interesting to see how Smokey had changed throughout the years.

We also learned about the three categories of rocks-igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary. We had to postpone our hike and search for rocks. Luckily I had rocks from the three types in our garage from a few years back. They are now interested in starting a rock collection of their own.

For Idaho I had them make a potato using construction paper. My dancing daughter was very creative. Chip my oldest was too sick to make one.

After their state page for Colorado I had Dancer watercolor a mountain scene to add into her state notebook. Here it is....

Utah we learned about salt. We had a quick experiment to see if things can float in salt water because they thought it was cool to float in salt water. For the experiment we filled one kitchen sink basin with water and the other with table salt water. Since we started with too much water on the salt basin side we had to add plenty of salt to compensate. First we tested items in the non salted water to see if they would sink to the bottom. We then tested them in the salt water. Many items failed due to their weight. We finally were successful with a giant fake penny my kids had. It sank to the bottom in the non salted water and floated in the salty water. The kids got a big kick out of pushing it under the water and watching it rise back up to the surface.

Here is a picture of a state page if you are curious what it looks like. I got the coloring page from the crayola website. The kids cut it out, glued it onto a construction paper page and added state stickers.

Here is list of books that we have read for this region:

- B is for Big Sky Country: A Montana Alphabet -Sneed Collard III
-Mountain Explorer -Greg Pyers
-Grizzly Bears-John Woodward
- Old Mother Bear - Victoria Miles
- Face to Face with the Grizzlies - Joel Sartore
- Tricks that Animals Play- Jan Nagel Clarkson
-Welcome to the USA Wyoming -Ann Heinrichs
- Whose Tracks are These? -Jim Nail
-Welcome to the USA Idaho - Ann Heinrichs
- One Potato, two potato - Cynthia DeFelice
- One Potato- Sue Porter
- The Eagle and the River- Charles Craighead
- Welcome to the USA Colorado -Ann Heinrichs
- C is for Centennial: A Colorado Alphabet - Louise Doak Whitney
- Coyote and the Laughing Butterflies - Harriet Peck Taylor
- Welcome to the USA Utah - Ann Heinrichs
- The Story of Salt- Mark Kurlansky
- A is for Arches: A Utah Alphabet book - Becky Hall
- Death Valley- June Behrens
- S is for Silver: A Nevada Alphabet - Eleanor Coerr