New Mexico unit

There’s an interesting thing about the Southwest United States, there are a lot of overlap because of the Spanish/Mexican influence. However, you can also see some very distinct differences between each state. Texas certainly learned that when we attempted to convince New Mexico to join us as part of the great country of Texas… We had a blast with our New Mexico state study, and this New Mexico book list was a lot of fun to read through as part of our geography lessons.

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New Mexico picture books

• New Mexico– I love the Rookie Reader books to give you a very brief overview of the states.
• Spanish Missions of New Mexico– we didn’t actually read this book but used it as part of our look at how Spain and  Mexico influenced the state
• Farolitos for Abuelo– this was a great book on a Mexican tradition and how it was adapted to New Mexico. It’s not specifically a Christmas book, but Farolitos are a Hispanic Christmas tradition
• Here Come the Aliens OR Even Aliens Need Snacks– obviously we could go with pretty much any book on aliens, my kids LOVED “Even Aliens Need Snacks” and it made for a fun discussion about if we thought aliens really landed at Roswell
• Little Gold Star– An absolutely charming Cinderella retelling that has me itching to do a Cinderella stories around the world unit.
• Sally’s Great Balloon Adventure– New Mexico has a hot air balloon festival every fall, so I chose this cute hot air balloon book for this book
• The Dirty Cowboy– This was probably Superman’s favorite book of all. It’s quite silly.
• The Secret of the Circle-K Cave– this was a fun mystery and had nice little bits of information shared in the book.
• The Secret Project– This was a fascinating look at the Manhattan Project and all the work that went into producing the atomic bomb. It also gave a bit of background information after the fact on what happened to the people in the area afterward
• The Secret Stars– Sadly this book was checked out when we studied New Mexico, but it looked to be an awesome story about family and the Hispanic culture

We read the same books about the Navajo as we read for the Arizona books, so that was more or less the same.

Our New Mexico Unit Study

First, there are the state notebooking pages. That’s simple and you can pick it up in my store (or join my newsletter and get the coupon for it ;)), and the New Mexico notebooking pages (found on the Subscriber page, join my newsletter)

On the top you have:

• How you got your clothes back- how you would get your clothes back from the dog after your bath, my kids seriously had so much fun with it
• Spanish Influence- after reading several books we wrote down what we saw as Spanish influence in New Mexico
• Did Aliens land at Roswell- after reading our silly aliens book we wrote down our own theories (Roswell field trip)
• Hot air balloon- first they decorated their hot air balloons, and then they wrote down how they’d get down the run away hot air balloon

Bottom picture:

• The Navajo Nation- we used our knowledge from visiting the Navajo nation several times to the books we’d read before to write down what we’d seen of the Navajo and the difficulties they have
• White Sands and the Atomic Bomb- previously we’ve discussed whether it was right to use the bomb on Japan, and this time we got to read about the people developing it, so they wrote down what they learned differently from the scientists’ point of view (World War 2 unit)
• My Cave Complex- since the Carlsbad Caverns are the biggest in our country, they all designed their own cavern complex. They went nuts with their caverns (hands on cave lesson, build a cave you can crawl through)

“Santa Fe, New Mexico #1” by gholmes is licensed under