Where We're From

We are in the midst of a big identity/mapping project. Each child took home a "family tree" worksheet, and came to school knowing where they were born, where each parent was born, and where their grandparents were born. Families are beautifully diverse, however, and we delighted in seeing that some families had several sets of grandparents, for example.

So far, we’ve used the worksheets to fill out two different charts. One chart was labeled STATES, and one chart labeled COUNTRIES. Using color-coded stickers, we placed a green sticker by the country name where we were born, a red sticker by the country our parents were born, and a yellow sticker where our grandparents were born. Then, we placed the same colored stickers by each state (if someone was born in the U.S.).

A cute dino filling out his information

You can see at a glance that most people were born in the US - all of the students in our class (green), and many parents (red) and grandparents (yellow). However, lots of yellow stickers in other countries as well!

Here is the states chart - heavily Michigan, especially for the students. but lots of red and yellow stickers on the other states. 

The next step will be to will apply all of this information to three maps – we have a Michigan map, a map of the United States, and a world map. We will see at a glance where each generation came from. This will probably happen next week.

Map reading, and learning basic geography skills (for instance, knowing the difference between city, state, and country), are very important, and are still being developed at this age. This project has been a great real-life application of these skills.