Sunday, June 23, 2013

4th of July Activity Wall

We decided on a 4th of July theme for our next activity wall. (I am secretly making this a history lesson for the kids as well.)

While we made this, I explained that the first flag the United States had did not look exactly like the flag we have today. For this activity wall, we made the first flag of the United States. We talked about why the first flag only had 13 stars and why the flag has 13 stripes. We used this website as a starting point to the history: http://www.usflag.org/history/the13starflag.html

I drew the 13 stripes on a piece of big white paper. I outlined all the red stripes with red paint. Then David painted inside all of the red outlines.

Next we painted the blue square.
 We cut out 13 stars.
On each star, I wrote what state it represented.
  • (1st) Delaware December 7th, 1787
  • (2nd) Pennsylvania December 12th,1787
  • (3rd) New Jersey December18th, 1787
  • (4th) Georgia January 2nd, 1788
  • (5th) Connecticut January 9th, 1788
  • (6th) Massachusetts February 6th, 1788
  • (7th) Maryland April 28th, 1788
  • (8th) South Carolina May 23rd, 1788
  • (9th) New Hampshire June 21st, 1788
  • (10th) Virginia June 25th, 1788
  • (11th) New York July 25th, 1788
  • (12th) North Carolina November 21st, 1789
  • (13th) Rhode Island May 29th, 1790



  • On the first day, the kids will see that the first star is Delaware. We are going to do a little bit of research about Delaware. After we do our research, I will direct the kids to their first activity. (I pinned a bunch of activities to a Summer board on Pinterest.) After they do their research each day, they can pick out an activity from that board.

    ***Addition: After doing this for a couple of days, I realized this was a perfect opportunity to teach the boys how to do research. So, we started a notebook. At the top of each page we wrote the name of the state and numbered the page 1 to 5. I talked to them about doing searches. For instance, I showed them that if they just typed in "Delaware" it wouldn't give them the facts they needed. I wanted them to find 5 facts about the state they didn't already know. So instead we typed in "Facts about Delaware" and got a great site for fast facts about all 50 states. This was also great writing practice for my 10-year-old. He worked on turning the facts into complete sentences.


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