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Illinois Unit
Any studies of Illinois will be dominated by Chicago, but I wanted it to go beyond the famous city in Illinois, so I did a bit of research and found some fun facts and people to study as we looked at the state. It was an interesting geography lesson, and our Illinois Unit was a fun addition to our 50 State Study.
Amusingly enough, while trying to find some good pictures of Illinois, all of my pictures are of Chicago. So, you win some and you lose some.
(there are lots of affiliate links in here)
Illinois Unit resources
As I mentioned I did a quick internet search to find more to share about the state and looked up lots of information.
Okay, now let’s see what can I find on YouTube.
Ummm…. wow, I found this one video it was 1 minute 49 seconds long, and the first 20 seconds was just an intro. It only had 10 facts. By the time it finally got around to the first fact, I was already done, then you only find out the facts by reading. If I’m going to read your video, then why am I watching it?
Okay, I’m done complaining about that video, instead let me share the exquisite pain of Homeschool Pop.
After attempting to watch a couple of more videos that were either clearly AI-generated, or an AI narrator. I found this one, that is still not the best, but apparently, despite having one of the most populated cities, there is not a lot of videos I would suggest for Illinois.
Illinois booklist
My library had several books on Illinois, and because President Obama was a relatively recent president, there are also several books on him and his wife, I just grabbed one, but obviously, you could easily switch out for another book about them.
- Barack Obama United States President– the particular book I grabbed was sadly printed shortly after he took office, so that means it focuses on his growing up years, and his time before the presidency
- Fiery Night– a sweet story based on true events of a young boy struggling to save his pet goat during the Great Chicago Fire, I love the illustrations in this book
- Walt Disney– a nice short biography about the founder of Disney at about a second grade reading level
- Exquisite– my great joy when I do these studies is to find someone I knew nothing about before this, and Gwendolyn Brooks is such a person, it’s a wonderful story of the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize (in her autobiography she wrote she preferred the term Black, a detail included in the picture book in the more information section at the back). The pictures pair great with this book, which has a lyrical feel without trying to be poetry or rhyme.
- Abraham Lincoln-a nice smile biography of the man aimed at a late 2nd grade, early 3rd grade reading level
- Abraham Lincoln comes home- a simple book telling the story of one boy who went to see the train taking Abraham Lincoln’s body back home
- Michelle Obama– another book written around 2009, so it also focuses on events before the presidency
- Hog Music– a story of a present an aunt sends to her niece “out west,” which at this point is Illinois, and how the present changes over time as people add to it as they bring it to her, super cute book
Okay continuing on…
Illinois Unit notebooking pages
It is with much sadness I report I do not have any pictures of the minibooks I originally made to go with our United States notebooking pages. This was completed as part of our mad dash to get all of the states completed their senior year and somehow I have no pictures from our first time learning about Illinois back when they were in kindergarten.
I have sadly very few fun facts written down, but here you go:
- it became a state in 1818
- the state seal was adopted in 1888
- Chicago is the largest state (and that’s all I wrote, so what was I thinking?)
- farming is a big part of Illinois’ economy
In case you are wondering, these are the minibooks which I have no picture of:
- state symbols
- Walt Disney
- Barack Obama
- Abraham Lincoln
- probably a few others, I need to sit and make sure
You can get all of that when you JOIN MY NEWSLETTER and it’s all on the subscriber page, and you’ll get a coupon to get the United States notebooking pages free as part of the welcome series.
That’s all I wrote, nothing about the famous people from there, or anything truly interesting. I guess that comes from using Homeschool Pop, which we mostly spend time making fun of as we watch it.
Sigh.
More great learning fun
- grego1402, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- By Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15259499
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