Arkansas Unit

As a kid, most of my knowledge of Arkansas was President Clinton was from there, and we made a lot of jokes about people in Arkansas being rather backwards. I have no clue why that is, but Arkansas and Mississippi were the two states we picked on. Now as a grownup I know there are some interesting things about the state, and our Arkansas unit let me learn a little more about it for our geography lessons.

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Arkansas Unit Resources

My first pass at looking up books for Arkansas literally found, Arkansas, that’s it. So I started searching by looking up Arkansas facts and famous people from Arkansas, so here are the websites I visited.

• Arkansas facts for kids
• Ducksters
• 50 facts

And for videos I found:

And while this is a great overview and has so much information, it’s over an hour long, which is less than appealing to my kids who want their information in 15 minutes give or take.

I headed over to Homeschool Pop and shared with them their favorite video to mock:

And the Arkansas tourism video:

Arkansas booklist

I’m typing this up before I’ve picked them up from the library because I was doing a whole slew of research for geography for this month all at the same time, so it was easier to just save it here. I’ll add more notes once we’ve studied Arkansas, but based off what I know of the various series these books are from, I’ll add my preliminary notes

• White-tailed deer– a good solid overview of the state mammal. It’s a long enough book, I recommend reading only bits and pieces
• Bill Clinton: forty-second president– this is not the one my library has, but it’s the ONLY one I could find on Amazon, and I tried a bunch of different ways to search that up. I was rather amazed how many biographies of him were printed in his first year or two of office and so are out of print
• Pine Trees– This a great series for a 1st/2nd-grade reading level
• Watch pine trees grow– a slightly more in-depth book for their state tree, yes most states have a state tree
• Honeybee: the busy life of apis mellifera– this is the only book on this list I haven’t seen a similar book, but from the cover and what I can see it looks decent

I was coming back to finish up this post and hadn’t realized I had the books all typed up. So speaking after the fact, they were all decent books, there wasn’t anything that we super enjoyed and stood out, which isn’t surprising given all of the books are fairly standard nonfiction books.

Arkansas notebooking pages

We used the United States notebooking pages and filled them out after watching the videos. Then we added in a few mini-books I made, those are on the subscriber page (join my newsletter to get access to that, AND as part of the welcome series you’ll get a coupon to get the notebooking pages free).

Mini-books:

• Bill Clinton
• honeybee- the state insect, and I figured that was an interesting one to have a mini-book on
• pine tree
• white-tailed deer
• state symbols
• Little Rock 9- not pictured because it was not created when I took the picture

Some interesting facts I wrote down:

• the state nickname (Natural State) came from a tourism campaign
• unofficially it’s called the Bear State
• Hernando DeSoto explored it, we don’t tend to think of him coming that far inland and that far North
• the Little Rock Nine, which now that I think about it, why didn’t I make a mini-book for that? I might see if I can go in and add that It has been created
• they claim to have invented queso!

Old Arkansas Unit

Way back when the kids were super little we also studied Arkansas, but I never wrote an Arkansas Unit post, I just added some of our activities, so let me find those and link to them:

• Arkansas: Rosie’s FiddleArkansas: Rosie’s Fiddle
• Arkansas flag
• Arkansas diamond mine

“Natural Hot Springs, Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas” by Ken Lund is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.