A TOS Review: State: The Facts!

Through the years, we’ve piddled with doing a proper State Study. I’ve kind of ‘piece-mealed’ our study together using a variety of different sources online or from the library. After reviewing State The Facts: A Guide to Studying Your State from Laurelwood Books, I’ve decided that using this particular product is the way to go.

Laurelwood Books provide resources for homeschoolers.  In fact, other members of the crew are reviewing Latin readers and Penmanship books. I decided that the State Study would be a fun summer project for Josiah.

Basically, State: The Facts is a consumable workbook. It can be used with any state (whether your own or another) and provides kids with the resources and ideas for studying a State. It was written by Mary Ellen Tedrow and intended for ages 8 and up.

The book can be worked through in order or your student can skip around to whatever section floats their boat.

It contains 58 pages of activities, resources and maps.

Some of those activities include:

Studying the history of your state.

Drawing the state and US flag.

Researching famous people like authors, presidents and scientist from your state.

Researching the wildlife and plant life found in your state.

Tracking your state weather.

Interesting field trips in your state and more!

Josiah’s very first assignment was to look up the contact information for the President, Vice President, our Senator and Congressmen and more. We even had to look up the number for our favorite librarian.

We live in Missouri and found plenty to talk about. This past year, we had completed a study of the Civil War and in particular, Missouri’s part in the war. Some of those things we were able to talk about again.

We looked up Mark Twain, revisited our study on George Washington Carver and talked about Harry Truman.

One of the things we didn’t get to (and this is why you might chose the “skip around method” was the Weather study. Josiah is fascinated with weather and our part of the country happens to have the most eclectic weather in the Union.

What I like best about the whole study is the uniqueness of the topics. It isn’t your average State Study. For example, there is a section on ‘Taxes.’ You are asked to look up the sales tax, personal property tax, business tax, etc. We are then asked to ask two different people what is done with the taxes collected.

The section then ends with a verse found in Luke.

My only complaint (and it is more of a ‘world we live in’ kind of issue) is that the student is asked to find the information in an encyclopedia, phone book, local library, etc. I realize that there is a lot of information found on the internet that is sketchy, but we did use the internet extensively in our research. Maybe a list of reputable internet sources could be added,

Overall, this is a really neat study. I love how the author basically teaches the student how to research. I want to use it with other states we study. These methods are much more beneficial than coloring state birds and plotting the state capital on the map.

Loved it!

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