Wisconsin unit

Hi, Future Ticia 2024 here, and we studied Wisconsin way back when the kids were in preschool/kindergarten, and then again when the kids were seniors. At that point, many of our geography lessons were review of places we had studied earlier and they did not remember. But, I’ve updated the original post, first by combining various parts of our original study into one place, and then finally by sharing what we did in high school, with more resources. I’m republishing so you can see the difference in what it looks like at two different ages.

Wisconsin, the land of cheese and… well cheese. At least if you ask my family that’s what we would say. I’ve heard it also has a football team, and some other stuff going on. The important thing to us every time we visit is to stop by the Wisconsin Cheese Factory and buy massively large amounts of cheese. However, once we sat down for our Wisconsin unit as part of our United States geography, we learned there’s quite a bit more to the state than just cheese, which meant this was a successful geography lesson.

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First our books for our Wisconsin Unit

Most of the books my library has are from the picture book series for the Little House books, so it might be slightly skewed that way.

• Little House Picture books: A Little House Birthday, Dance at Grandpa’s, Christmas in the Big Woods, Summertime in the Big Woods, Winter Days in the Big Woods, and The Deer in the Wood– I loved these books for a nice introduction to the series
• Clarabelle: making milk and so much more– since Superman is a big fan of drinking milk and all of its’ related products, this was a big hit
• Century Farm: 100 Years on a Family Farm- This was a bit long, so we read parts from it, but it has a nice look at a family farm
• Extra cheese, please!: mozzarella’s journey from cow to pizza– Pizza is always a hit at our house, so of course we loved this
• Wisconsin– while we don’t read all of it, it gives a nice overview of Wisconsin
• Time for Cranberries– a nice picture book about how cranberries are grown, I learned a lot from it
• The Giant Ball of String– a super cute fictional story about a Wisconsin town that has the largest ball of string, until another town steals it!

Our Wisconsin Lapbook Notebook Lapbook

Way back when my kids were little, we actually made lapbooks, but now I’ve changed it more into notebooking pages with some lapbook elements. All of the printables can be found on the subscriber page (you subscribe to my emails right?), and the United States notebooking pages can be picked up at my store (you’ll want to subscribe because there’s a surprise in the geography sequence, hint hint coupon!).

Left-hand side of the Wisconsin lapbook:

top- summary of what they remember of the Little House books and picture of one of their houses.

• Superman’s memory: There was a brick house and it didn’t went down.  The Daddy sang songs and fight deers.  He shoot deers.  And they had two sons and the Mommy and the Daddy.  And then they lived happily ever after.  Then they didn’t have any lunch, was the farm picture.  Then their Daddy went in a tree to shoot the deer, and that’s all I will tell you.  THE END
• Princess: There was a brick house and they lived.  And their Daddy was singing songs and the fire was on and and and and and and and their Mom was holding the baby.  They lived happily ever after.
• Batman: They didn’t eat deer meat.  I don’t know.  I only know about one thing.  I don’t know what else.

Can you tell they got progressively less interested in this?  And Superman had help from his brother and sister.

Underneath it was a picture of Superman rolling out the pizza dough.  Here’s how to make pizza from scratch according to Superman: “Make it flat.  Then we roll it.  Put on the crust and then cook it.  Put on the sauce.  Yes, we need cheese, so put on cheese.  Eat it.”  In case you can’t tell it took a lot of prompting to get him to say even that.  He was just going to cook it and eat it.  We also tried to make ice cream, but that didn’t turn out so well.

Oh, and next to the Little House picture is information about the state animal, the badger.

RIGHT SIDE OF OUR WISCONSIN LAPBOOK

Top left, a fold-out of what we get from cows.  Superman didn’t quite glue those on how I expected him to, but that’s okay.

Top right, symbols of Wisconsin booklet.

Bottom our postcards from Refined Metals Academy.

Want to learn more about Wisconsin?

My husband’s family is from Wisconsin, so we’ve been on a few “field trips” up there to visit family

I just realized I combined some of those posts into one bigger post, so it’s not quite as many posts as I thought, so I’ll include other people’s posts as well

• Wisconsin Duck Rides
• Wisconsin printables and coloring pages
•  Well, since I first updated this a few years ago, I have further deleted more posts, so I need to find more to share.

Oh well, now to our future Wisconsin Unit

Wisconsin Unit Resources

Back when my kids were in preschool, YouTube was not a thing, however, once they were up in middle school and high school, we used that resource frequently.

I will first share with you the epitome of pain, that my kids love to mock. Homeschool Pop. I can still hear his voice, and it causes psychic damage.

Then we have the trying to be cool, and including a weird rap, but does not cause as much psychic damage, National Geographic with the rapping bald eagle.

Then is something aimed at adults, and sometimes the videos are great, and sometimes the videos are awful. They also kept getting longer and did not always have enough information for that time. But, I give you Unboxing Wisconsin.

I haven’t watched this yet, but I’m curious to find out the entire history of Wisconsin in 10 minutes. I’m sure it will be super in-depth and very complicated.

Now that I have given you all of the possible videos you could ever want on Wisconsin.

Wait, I know that’s not true. Some of you do want more, and some of you are thinking, “Ticia, do I really need that many videos?” The answer is clearly yes.

Wisconsin Unit Notebooking Pages

As I mentioned up above we used the United States notebooking pages, and filled them out.

Things that amused me when we finished our study this last time.

• Their nickname is Badger State
• they make the most cheese in the country
• They have a circus museum
• I just realized I missed the opportunity to have them make Georgia O’Keefe art, man, I need to do that now. Just me. You’re missing out kids.

Okay, clearly Future Ticia 2024 needs to get off the computer and do something else because I am getting silly.

Instead, I’ll leave you with these random fun learning ideas.

More learning fun

I’m just randomly tabbing through my old posts and grabbing some. I’m sure they will be fascinating to you.

My daughter says I have a sarcasm problem. She has no idea.

• Oklahoma Unit
• Ramona book club
• Fresco art style lesson
• Fractions lesson
• First-grade homeschool picks

RAHurd, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Originally published April 16, 2010