National Treasure Bingo

With our "Flag Week" complete, we then moved into a discussion of several of the other national symbols and national monuments. In our studies we looked at the history, building, and current location of: The White House, The Washington Monument, the Capitol Building, Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, The Statue of Liberty, and Mount Rushmore. (We also covered the national bird, flower and tree, but since this was a place our science and geography units overlapped, I'll cover those in another post.) The kids loved this unit, especially since we were fortunate enough to be able to visit a number of these sights within the last year. In fact, as we talked about these places, we decided it would be fun to make a poster with pictures of us from when we visited these places. I think that not only helped the kids see what they looked like in real life, but also helped them to remember their visits there and add extra meaning to our unit. Here is a photo of our National Symbols Poster Board:



The only place that we didn't a have a photo for was Mount Rushmore, and since we are going there in a few weeks, we left a spot on our poster so we can add a picture once we're home.

After reviewing all of these fun historical symbols/monuments, we concluded our second week of our USA unit with one of my more clever home schooling activities. (or at least I thought so.) I got online and searched clip art pictures of all of the national symbols. Then I printed out multiple copies of each picture and let the kids make a bingo card out of the images. After a few rounds of original bingo to be sure the kids recognized each picture, then we played my new, improved version of bingo. Instead of having someone call out the items on the card, I simply slipped in our National Treasure DVD and the kids played National Treasure Bingo as they watched. (I already watched it before hand so I knew all of our places and symbols were represented on the movie.) The kids loved it. And they did great. I thought they might forget about the bingo cards after getting too engrossed in the move, but they didn't. They noticed every building, monument, and even each time there was an American Flag. After watching the movie they also wanted to learn about a few things they saw that we didn't cover in our unit--like the National Seal, and the people and symbols on our dollars and coins. It was so exciting to see them showing so much interest in learning. It makes the stress of home-schooling seem so worth it.