Trekking across The States - Colorado (finally)

Hi Everyone, it has definitely been a while! We are so far behind in our State study that it's not funny! We have just had so much sickness in our house over the last 2 months it's not funny...........anyway, we finally made it to Colorado and learned some pretty interesting things:

First off, we did our little introductory page where we touched on the state shape, the state flower and the ski slopes.

We made our own Colorado state flag.

We learned that billions of coins are made at the U.S. Mont in Denver each year so we did a little coin counting activity.

We discovered many interesting things about the Rocky Mountains like the fact that there are more than 1000 Rocky Mountain peaks that are over 10, 000 feet high and 54 peaks that are over 14,000 feet high! We also found out that in 1893, Katherine Lee Bates wrote "America the beautiful" after looking at the view from Pikes Peak.

we also learned a little bit about some of the animals that live in the Rocky Mountains.

There seems to be a lot of debate about where the "cheeseburger" was officially thought up.........we went with Colorado as Louis Ballast (Humpty Dumpty drive thru) was awarded the trademark name for "cheeseburger".

In the 1970's, two of the biggest dinosaur skeletons were dug up near Grand Junction. Since Dinosaurs are a HUGE hit in our house, we spent most of the week doing a dinosaur theme. I have LOTS to share with you about that (in another post).

Some other things you can do with this state:

Coin rubbings

PowerPoint from 1+1+1=1 (members only section)

Don't forget to check out Get Down and Get Your Hands Dirty (Kristalyn did an amazing little ski race with her little guys) and Montessori Tidbits (Leann made a super cook skiing dice game for her son) for some other neat ideas!

The cute graphics you see in the "Trekking" button are from Scrappin Doodles. Thanks, Denyse for allowing us to use them!

I am going to link this to:

Hey everyone, head over to:
and join in Maureen birthday bash (it's a celebration of her blog birthday and her actual birthday)........each day there will be party favors given away on her FB page....don't worry if you don't have FB, the favors will be here to (just a day later). Some of the people that helped Maureen out with the favors are: Homeschool Creations, 1+1+1=1, Mama Jenn, The Crafty Classroom, The Notebooking Fairy, 2 Teaching Mommies and me. There will also be lots of give aways. Head on over and check it out!! It's also my birthday this week (on Friday)....I'll be the big 3-4! Happy celebrating :-)

Come and Join the fun- The 2011 Ultimate Blog Party!

This is my first year at joining the fun over at 5 minutes for mom and their "Ultimate Blog Party". How fun! I am so excited about checking out some blogs and meeting some great moms (and hopefully making some new friends too).

For those of you that have stopped by from the party, let me introduce myself:

This is me (and my darling hubby)! I'm Michelle and my blog is all about creating fun things for you to do with your little learners. I am an elementary teacher who currently lives and works at a residential school - (although right now I'm not teaching - I'm "house parenting" with my husband. we have 12 middle school boys that live with us and our own two little boys).

I LOVE being creative but HATE the mess that this usually entails so I decided to teach myself some graphic skills and found that I REALLY enjoy sitting at the computer (once my two boys are sleeping) to create some free units of fun! What a huge blessing to be able to create yet have no mess to clean up! My latest unit is a SPRING unit which you can check out here. Also make sure you check out my printables page as it has all the other units I've completed too.

I also began doing a state study with my preschooler (and two other blogging friends) which we call "Trekking across The States". I provide printables and ideas for hands on learning that you can use with your own little ones. You can check out my "Trekking" posts here.

I can't wait to check out your blogs and meet some of you amazing moms! If you haven't joined in the party, click here to join in the fun!

Put your umbrellas up!

It seems like the weather has to decided to play a little April fools trick and taken us back to winter!! Ugh!!! It's freezing outside and raining buckets (when it's not trying to snow).

Due the the fact that it's so rainy, I made a little color/counting activity book ..........hope you can use it too. You can find it in my TPT store.