West Virginia Unit

As I write these posts I try to find pictures that capture the idea of the state. There is no specific “this location says West Virginia,” instead I think of rolling mountains covered in trees, and I start hearing a sort of vague blue grass song in my head that I don’t even really know all of just that suddenly the singer is loudly singing, “Mountain roads, take me home, to the place I belong.” So when I finally found a couple of pictures for this geography lesson of rolling mountains in West Virginia, that’s what I’m using for my West Virginia Unit to throw into this uber United States Geography Unit.

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West Virginia Unit resources

I’m going to be honest, by the time we completed our West Virginia Unit we were at the very end of our Senior year and we were more completing it so I could say, “Look! We got it done,” than so they could really learn things, and the kids were at the point of peak sarcasm.

With that, what we did together and what they really filled out is not that much, but part of this is the exposure I wanted them to get. I just wanted you to know that so you know why the pictures of our notebooking pages don’t have the mini-books I made afterward, and why I don’t mention any of that, because at that point I had completely given up on that with the kids, so the books I found later on, was more for my curiosity, than because I really thought the kids would get much use from them.

West Virginia Facts

As I’m creating my booklist after the fact, I’m using the websites to find some better sources for books beyond just “West Virginia” in my search.

And after reading through those facts, I was left with much of what I had before. There are several really cool things, but not much that is easy to make a mini-book about. Mining is interesting, but not something you can easily have kids make a mini-book about. Kids love animals, so I’m going to include that for sure, Harper’s Ferry is important for leading to the Civil War, so I had already planned that.

There are several people that depending on your interests could be important, as in I had a passing familiarity with their names, but no one I felt I should say, “Kids let’s learn this!”

I’ll be honest, this would fall into what my daughter would say is a perfect example of how I would teach history. It’s a random assortment of stories that are really cool. So I have many random stories that are really interesting about West Virginia, but they’re not useful. So I could tell you that the racial slur redneck came from West Virginia to talk about the people there who worked in the fields and their necks would get sunburned, so they would be called rednecks to imply there were lesser because they were outside all day.

A lot of the company mining towns were in West Virginia, and that’s where we get a lot of the bad associations from the idea of company towns and coal mining.

Quite probably Katniss is from West Virginia in Hunger Games.

But, that’s not super helpful for anything beyond random knowledge.

West Virginia Unit — Isn’t that pretty? This is one of the “pretty sites in West Virginia” photos I found. I’ve got a link to the official location at the bottom of the post.

West Virginia booklist

Okay, I’m heading to the library to verify I like these tomorrow, but I’m putting them in now. Most of these are generic books, so I’m saying what my library has, but you could easily switch to a different book on the same topic.

West Virginia– there are about a million versions of a book like this, my library technically has two books like this, they’re written for about a 3rd grade reading level and are useful for any state report you might be writing
Cardinals– again, our library had 5 books on cardinals, I picked this one to represent what to look for
A piece of home– I’m going to add this into my Immigration booklist, but I’m looking forward to reading it
Let Me Fix You a Plate– a tale of two grandmas, one in West Virginia, and one down in Florida who is from Colombia, which has me intrigued
Albert– Donna Jo Napoli is an author who is great at crafting an enticing story and she always has great illustrators to go with her beautiful words
John Brown: his fight for freedom– I’m looking forward to checking this one out, I’ll be curious to see how they talk about this controversial figure

Okay, I’ve had this stuck in my head the entire time I’ve been writing this post, and I only know like two lines from this song, so I’m going to get it stuck in your head now. Here you go:

Which is the perfect way to head over to the list of videos I found, such as they were.

West Virginia YouTube videos

Okay, let’s see what psychic damage I can do to you with how mind-numbing these videos are.

Wait, it’s super late! I need to stop and eat lunch. I’ll be back after lunch.

Lunch has been obtained, I have done some cleaning and some laundry and I am back!

First, we have the super painful Homeschool Pop.

Even without watching it, I can hear the start of this video and it has caused psychic damage. In the last round of cleaning my desk, I finally put away the blue D4 that has been sitting on it forever.

Okay, I am only including this video because when I was looking up books for West Virginia, one that is on order for my library is MothMan Saves Christmas or something similar, apparently the cryptid for West Virginia is a Mothman, and this greatly amuses me.

I had found another video on West Virginia, but the voice sounded computer-generated and it was annoying to me, so I just couldn’t.

Sadly, Nat Geo Kids never finished their 50 Birds, 50 States series, so I can’t link that one. It was super cheesy, but it was much less painful than Homeschool Pop.

Oh, this one is useful! Something most people are curious about, so let’s add this in here.

It’s only about six minutes long, but I think it has probably the least annoying delivery of the various facts. It certainly beats Homeschool Pop. It may have healed the psychic damage I took from even thinking about that stupid channel.

West Virginia Notebooking Pages

We filled out the United States notebooking pages which you can get free if you JOIN MY NEWSLETTER (you get a coupon as part of the welcome cycle, it’s in like email 3 I think).

I’ve got John Denver in my head again as he’s singing about Country Roads again. Here are my fun facts for West Virginia, maybe one of them should be that song:

There is a lot of coal mining
it split from Virginia during the Civil War
it has 6 national parks

Here are the mini-books I’ve added in after the fact:

John Brown and Harper’s Ferry (note to self double check if the library has a book on him- it did also note to self, I should write a post on him)
black bear
northern cardinal

West Virginia Unit geography United States North America 12th grade

Some more great learning fun

Okay, I’m gonna look around in my mess of posts I’ve got and grab a few interesting things I’ve written before to share with y’all. And let’s see if I can get that song out of my head.

Seriously, it’s just stuck in there, no matter what I do.

Picture taken by Kevin Smith, Copyrighted free use, via Wikimedia Commons
Asilverstein, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons