Monday, March 14, 2011

Eat Your Way Around the USA!

Our homeschool group hosted a fun event last week.  It was called Eat Your Way Around the USA.  The way it worked was that each family signed up to host a table on a different State.  At each table there was information about that State, a bite size snack of food from the State and the kids got a stamp in their passport from each State.  IT WAS A BLAST!

My family hosted the California table. 

I wanted to do California because:

A) All the kids were born there.
B) We did a year on CA when my oldest was in 4th grade and so I have LOTS of stuff!
C) WE LOVE CALIFORNIA!!!!

I decided that since there is SO much history in CA we needed to put aside our regular schoolwork and focus on this for 6 week.  So here is what we presented.

This is an overview of our table.  (Sorry about the lines. Apparently the miniblinds were messing with my camera.) On the board we had a section on the Gold Rush and Industry, Tourism and LOTS of pictures of our family at famous places in CA.  We also had a timeline, info on the State flower, insect, etc and a little report my daughter wrote called Why I Love California!

Here is what was on the table...

This is the salt dough map the kids made.  It was very FUN!  If you look close you can see we have pink and blue beads on Sacramento, where the littles were born.  And a blue bead on LA where my oldest was born.

The food we shared was raisins.  We learned that all commercial raisins eaten in the USA and 1/2 around the world come from CA!

The star of our table was the mission the kids and I made.  I will probably do a whole post just about making this later.  :^)

This section was on westward expansion.  We built the covered wagon from a kit. 


This area was about the food grown in CA and things invented in CA.  There are a lot more things that were invented there than this.  We displayed:  jeans, a computer mouse, sour dough bread, a Barbie, a Frisbee, a hula hoop and a fortune cookie!In the notebook we had a coloring book I found about the A to Z of food grown in CA. 

Last, but not least, here is my sweet daughter sporting the "Made In California" tie-dye t-shirt I made her!  I just couldn't resist!  LOL

So that was it.  We had a total of 20 States represented.  Everyone did such a great job with their displays.  We learned SO much and had a great time together with our friends!

Happy Homeschooling,

Jamin