Vermont Unit

Going into our Vermont unit, I knew almost nothing about Vermont. That being said, I super duper loved our it, if only because it gave me an excuse to eat ice cream.  That’s a valid reason, right? I’ll take one for the team if I get to eat ice cream as part of our geography lessons.

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Hi! Future Ticia 2023, we went through and did a quick study of Vermont again, since my kids don’t distinctly remember learning about the state when we first did years ago. So I’ll add in a few more resources and things we used this time around.

Vermont Unit Resources

Let’s start with the books we used for the Vermont Unit. I still have very fond memories of many of these books. I think both Tricking the Tallyman and Nora’s Ark are hugely memorable.

• Alec’s Primer– a young enslaved person’s journey to freedom starts with learning to read, and he later becomes a landowner in Vermont (future Ticia 2023 writing my notes, I need to add this to my Underground Railroad books post)
• Ice Cream: the Full Scoop– Gail Gibbons book on ice cream, totally on board for that
• Ice Cream– with Ben and Jerry’s ice cream you gotta have a couple of books on ice cream
• Nora’s Ark– the story of a young girl who helps save neighbors and animals during a 1927 flood
• Silent Night– the illustrator set this version of the classic Christmas carol in Vermont, so the pictures are fun
• Sweet Pea and friends: the SheepOver– a cute story about an orphan sheep and the farmer who helps her grow up
• The Mysterious Tadpole– we used this for a book about the monster in Lake Champlain, Champy
• Tricking the Tallyman– I LOVE this book, it’s such a cute story of a town trying to figure out how many people they want in it

For videos, there are just not any good videos for United States geography, so I give you the two videos we alternate between with the kids. We joke they cause psychic damage as you watch them.

Homeschool Pop videos leave us mocking them afterwards and repharsing everything we say three times just like he does in the videos. You can tell he is trying to make the videos longer without adding content. Take 2 D4 psychic damage.

While the National Geographic videos are not as painful in repetition, it is painful as you listen to the chorus repeated over and over again in a three minute video. If they cut down on repeating the chorus and the animation, and instead added in just a little more information, it would be a much better video. Take 1 D4+2 psychic damage.

Robotic voice, intensely painful and he talks so insanely slow. Take 1 D6 psychic damage.

A complete unknown, I didn’t find this one when we were studying Vermont originally, so I give it to you with no commentary. I was hoping if I scrolled down I could find the two tween girls and the weird sock puppet, but I haven’t seen that one yet.

Now let me see what I can find for interesting facts to pull up:

• Vermont Facts from National Geographic
• 50 Interesting Facts about Vermont
• Vermont facts from Ducksters
• 43 Interesting Facts about Vermont– they’re INTERESTING

Side note on the image I found for Vermont, strangely the usual site I go to for images has changed the way they share images, so I’m getting very strange results. Finally, I settled on this image from their Constitution House, a location I didn’t know existed until looking it up. We don’t tend to think of Vermont in the 1700s.

Our Vermont Unit notebooking pages

I’m including a picture of our Vermont unit, first is from way back when we first did this, but it’s missing a few pieces on it, and a second picture of the updated and fancy version….

Future Ticia 2023 here, I forgot to tell you the basis for our Vermont notebooking pages are the United States Notebooking pages (you can get a coupon to get them free if you join my newsletter). There is also a subscriber page, and it has the Vermont mini-books.

Vermont had some really fun books to go with it, and a few that weren’t specifically Vermont, but fit in with things they were known for:

• Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream- let me tell you, any book and activity that includes ice cream is quite heartily approved of (this was originally a post, but I deleted it because it was basically “we ate ice cream).
• John Deere tractors – if you go to the post there are several suggestions for great books because my library didn’t have much, in this we focused on making tools for farmers
• Champy- Vermont’s very own version of the Loch Ness Monster, Christy, who is now blogging over at Snacks and Stories (now defunct blog), turned me on to the idea of Champy.  We used Mysterious Tadpole, which is really about the Loch Ness Monster, but it worked just fine.  I also have to add, I LOVE stories like this.
• Nora’s Ark- a super cute true story, and it gave my kids a lot to think about what they would save if they had to leave their house (They revisited this in the Runaway Scrape Fight lesson), this also was originally a post, but also was not much to recreate, so I’m working to streamline my site and delete things like that
• Tricking the Tally Man– mwa ha ha, bring in math and history all in one well-written and illustrated book, SCORE!

I’m gonna link this over to Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns and her reading linkie. Since she took her blog private, clearly I am not going to go over there. I feel like I should be saying, “Stay off my lawn kids,” with how old my blog is.

Sigh, poor poor Ticia. I figured since I redid the studies, I’m going to reshare the posts, and that helps clear out my ginormous pile of geography posts to write.

Some more great learning fun

Since we first did this study in first grade, let’s see what I’ve tagged with 1st grade.

• Dental Health lesson
• Using notebooking pages with your nature study
• Does a pumpkin float?
• Thomas Edison lesson
• Louisiana Unit
• Graphing Green Eggs and Ham

Originally published January 28, 2012

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