We’ve been “traveling” through the five regions of the United States in a year long unit, tying in all subjects along our way, and now we can check the southwest region off of our list! It’s been so much fun and full of hands on activities! You can find our past region units here:
NORTHEAST REGION
MIDWEST REGION
SOUTHEAST REGION
We just finished up visiting the southwest region, which was our quickest yet at only a few weeks. But we still covered a lot of ground, so let’s get to it:
INTRO
As I’ve mentioned in our last posts we use lap books and an oversized map to keep track of our travels. (You can find links to the lap books in the Northeast Region post linked above.) This keeps a lot of our learning in one place, which is helpful when you cover so much! Here is what they looked like for the southwest region:
I had out our landform cards for this portion of the southwest region. I only bring out those that are somewhat new to my son or that need reviewing:
TALL TALES
Our literature and writing project for the duration of our southwest region unit focused on tall tales! We read a variety of classic tall tales and tall tales from other cultures as well. My son LOVED reading these! As most of them are humorous, he was cracking up with so many of them. We tied in similes and onomatopoeia as well. Pecos Bill Invents the Ten-Gallon Hat is a great mentor text for onomatopoeia! Here are some of the classic tales that we read:
This book in particular is great for teacher read alouds and includes tall tales centering around women from multiple cultures. I’ve included a picture of the table of contents for specifics:
We would read one tale and use sticky notes to tag every time exaggeration was used. By the end it was a great visual to see just how much exaggeration was used!
My son then filled out this graphic organizer about each tall tale we read. (This graphic organizer is part of my tall tale unit, which I’ll get to in a sec!)
I try to get in at least one extensive writing project per quarter, and so far we have done a scary story, a research report, and now a tall tale. We had so much fun with this that I decided to create a Tall Tale Unit for my Teachers Pay Teachers store! My Fractured Fairy Tale unit has been used in over 500 classrooms nationwide, so I am SO excited to finally get another writing unit out there!
This writing unit includes the graphic organizer to compare classic tall tales, a graphic organizer to help brainstorm your own tall tale, a flow chart to be used to help prewrite, instructional posters, exemplars for each step of the writing process, and three sizes of stationary. My son used the skinniest, which made his tall tale literally a very tall tale!
Here is an example of the different sizes of stationary available in my unit:
We had a lot of fun writing these together! It’s VERY rare my son gets excited about writing, y’all, so when he shows any interest, you better believe I will pounce on it.
TEXAS – Rio Grande, Cattle Ranching, the Alamo, and Oil
We honestly didn’t spend a ton of time talking about Texas because my son is already very familiar since that is where “home” is for us. Although we are a military family and move a lot, we always come back to Texas to visit family and friends.
The first thing we did as an intro was play this Texas Bingo game, which I played when I was single digit years old. It’s seen better days, but I have very fond memories of playing this with my family, so my son and I played together! It’s perfect because it is just a bunch of symbols of Texas, and on the back of all the cards it gives some information about the symbol. Perfect addition to our travels to Texas! You can find the updated version on Amazon HERE!
We read about the Rio Grande River in our paired passage and drew/labeled it on our oversized map.
We learned about cattle ranching by watching this video and reading about it in our Eyewitness book about Texas:
We learned about rodeos from this newscast by Teen Kids News:
We began learning about the Alamo by reading about what missions were and then watching this video about the Alamo. We got more in-depth into missions when we started talking about the Pueblo people (will get to in a sec!).
We then watched this video about what the Alamo looks like today:
We can’t travel to the southwest region without reviewing where the Gulf of Mexico is (we learned about it during our travels to the southeast). We then began learning about the “black gold” of the southwest. We watched this video about oil in general and how it came to be:
This video is great to visually show how offshore drill work:
And then this video shows what it is like working on an offshore drill. My son was pretty amazed that these existed!
OKLAHOMA – Tornadoes
For Oklahoma we tied in some weather science by focusing on tornadoes! My husband and I lived in Moore, OK the first couple of years of our marriage, and as a kid I lived in Nebraska, Kansas, Texas and Alabama, so tornadoes are things I am very familiar with! Probably a reason I love storms so much today.
We had already done a unit on hurricanes when we visited to the southeast, so it was time to learn how tornadoes are different. My son already had a general understanding of what they looked like, but that was about it.
We used Gail Gibbons’ Tornadoes! as our anchor text and tied in everything from there.
As we read through and watched our videos, my son filled out this CAN/HAVE/ARE graphic organizer and then used all of the info he wrote to form a paragraph on tornado-themed stationary. (You can get both for FREE HERE or by clicking the pictures below!) As he was writing I made sure to have some thunderstorm sounds on in the background, which you can find easily on YouTube. Just a fun added touch!
We watched this video about how tornadoes form:
And we read some more details in this awesome book about weather!
For fun we also made a tornado in a bottle, which is super easy and always gets kids excited! All you have to do is get 2 two liters, fill one about 2/3 with water (add some food coloring), place a metal washer on top of the bottle opening and then place the second bottle on top. Tape it really securely, flip, and swirl!
My son also completed a passage with questions from ReadWorks.org about how to stay safe during tornadoes. We don’t do a ton of these, but I do feel that kids need to be familiar with this type of assignment, so we do them periodically and then discuss. I HIGHLY recommend ReadWorks for these types of passages, though. You can choose reading passages from all types of genres and search by reading and grade level. And it’s FREE!
Finally we watched episode 2 of the Storm Rising series on Disney+, which follows Reed Timmer, an extreme meteorologist and storm chaser. I actually follow him on social media because he is the best of the best when it comes to tracking down tornadoes! I think in another life I would’ve been a storm chaser. I seriously love them! But he is very animated, so he kept my son’s attention. There are a few times he uses “adult” words, so use your own judgement.
We added a “tornado” to our large map made from…wait for it…dryer lint. Yup! Use what you have, people.
DESERT PLANTS AND ANIMALS
We lived in the Mojave Desert of southern CA for the past two years, so my son is familiar with southwest region desert life! We focused on some of the plants and animals he wasn’t as exposed to, particularly the saguaro cactus and some other cactus species.
We read this pop up book about desert plants and animals, which was fun to read. My son loved it! I remember loving pop up books as a kid and finding all of the little secret hidden places in the flaps. Didn’t disappoint:
We started focusing more on cacti by going through this Mystery Science lesson about them. Y’all already know how much I LOVE Mystery Science. Such a great resource!
We read this nonfiction reader about cactus from Rooted in Reading, which gave a lot of good specifics my son hadn’t learned yet.
We took this virtual field trip to the Sonoran Desert and labeled it on our large map:
And then we watched this video specifically about saguaro cactus:
My son was very interested in seeing what the inside of a cactus looked like, so I got a small one for us to dissect! He was surprised how hard it was to cut into and how the inside was kind of slimy.
He then asked if it could grow back, so we are experimenting with that to see what will happen! I love how many questions come up with all of these activities we do.
ARIZONA – Grand Canyon, Meteor Crater, Colorado River, Colorado Plateau, and the Petrified Forest
On our way from CA to VA last year we drove to the Grand Canyon and stopped to see the Meteor Crater in Winslow. Both of these are just something you have to see in person to fully grasp how awesome they are. I had only flown over the Grand Canyon, so to see it in person was a huge check off my bucket list! I printed out pictures of our visit and we glued them to the southwest region portion of our large map:
We read about how bringing water to the southwest region was important and watched this video about how the Colorado River Aqueduct does just that. We actually drove over this aqueduct multiple times while living in the Mojave Desert! Pretty cool engineering!
We talked about the Colorado Plateau, reviewing the plateau landform with this video from Crash Course:
We didn’t get to see the Petrified Forest on our move from CA to VA, so we took this virtual field trip instead. We love Nat Geo Kids videos! My son thought this was very cool!
PUEBLO PEOPLE – With a Focus on the Hopi Tribe
Our last week in the southwest was devoted to learning about the peaceful Hopi people. The Hopi are Pueblo people that reside in the southwest, mainly in northeastern AZ. We began by learning about the Pueblo first through this video:
We also watched a Brainpop Jr. video about the Pueblo.
We did a lot of reading and video watching to learn about the Hopi people. Our main text was this book by Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve.
I believe that reading sources written by the people you are learning about (when possible) is important, so we mainly used this text, which explained so much.
We watched this beautiful video illustrating the Hopi origin story and compared it to other origin stories that we have learned about this year through our travels:
We read in our book about adobe and how the Hopi built their homes. We then went on this virtual field trip to the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico:
We read about the Hopi religion and learned about the spiritual and ceremonial Kachina (or Katsina) dolls. Kachina dolls are representations of benevolent spirit beings who live among the Hopi and who possess powers over nature, especially the weather. These Kachinas first arrive on the Hopi mesas in December and return to their spiritual homes in July. The dolls are traditionally made out of roots of the cottonwood tree because they are softer wood and abundant in the southwest. From ages 1-10 girls are given two dolls each year as gifts.
We watched this interview with a doll carver to learn more about the process of creating them:
In preparation for this unit I bought a small “Thunder” Kachina doll that was made and signed by Grace Pooley, daughter of the late George Pooley, a well-known Hopi artist from Arizona. He created a “Route 66” kachina doll series back in the 70s, and this particular doll is a replica of one from that line. (I purchased it from KachinaCountryUSArt on Etsy.) I thought that a Thunder Kachina tied in so well with everything we had been learning about, and it now has a home on our shelf overlooking our learning space. My son was excited to learn that we have a real one!
We read about Hopi pottery and their distinctive geometric designs and then watched this interview with a Hopi potter:
We observed more designs of Hopi pottery and I printed some out for us to refer to. We took it to a pottery painting place near us and painted a bowl in the same style. Afterwards my son said he was amazed how they could create the detailed patterns they did. It’s definitely harder than it looks! Their work is so impressive.
That’s a wrap on the southwest! Onto our last region for the year, the west! Stay tuned!
Pin to save:
Leave A Reply