Summer Learning Series: Where I Live

Every child loves summer. Summer is a time for playing outside, swimming in the pool, and hanging out with your friends. Unfortunately, summer is also a time when kids lose a lot of what they learned during the previous year of school. As an elementary school teacher, it was frustrating to watch my students struggle at the beginning of each year with objectives that they had mastered the previous year. As a parent, I want to make sure that this doesn’t happen to my children. This summer, I will be setting aside a little time each day for some fun learning activities for my kids. Starting in June, check in each Tuesday if you are looking for some activities for your kids. I will be posting a few things we did the previous week to share. Also if you are interested in doing the same thing, I would love to link up with all you creative moms out there! Just shoot me an email and let me know you are interested. (betweenthelines-kam@hotmail.com)  Let’s work together to help our children have a fun, but educational summer!

“Where do I live?” is a big question. For my kids, they have now learned that they live in a house, on a street, in a neighbor that’s part of a town, that belongs to a state, that’s part of a country on the planet Earth. I know that’s a bit much, but they love learning new things. This week I am teaching a “camp” to some of my friend’s kids and we learned where we lived, but not to such a great extent.

The first thing we talked about was our address. We discussed the importance of remembering your own address and how the post office uses our address to send us our mail. After we all practiced our address we designed our own mailboxes. We used mini cereal boxes and construction paper.  On one side of the mailbox the kids put a sticker with their address and on the other a flag to use when they want to send out mail. Throughout the week the kids will be able to send mail to each other. Should be fun!

The next thing we talked about was our state. Since the kids I’m working with are between the ages of 3 and 6, we kept it simple. We learned about where our state was on the US map, where our town was on the state map, and our state’s capital, bird, and flower. We then decorated our state’s flag and glued on pictures of the state bird and flower. On the opposite side, we put a state map with a star for the capital.  They turned out real cute, but the pictures didn't come out well. 

The kids all had fun making them and telling me all the things they knew about where they lived. Picture nine little girls having a million things to say at once. It was kind of funny! Do your kids know about where they live? What tricks have you used to help them remember their address? Grab a latte, put up your feet, and join the discussion!