Hawaii Unit Study ~ Day One

The Continental Pacific States came first on our trip across the USA. It matched perfectly with our vacation and while on that vacation I delighted in hearing "Oh mama! Another California Quail!", "That sign said Sacramento." and "Look! It's more Rhododendrons!"

Now that we are home, and have recovered somewhat, we are moving on to the Pacific States that we didn't get to visit. This week our state is Hawaii.

I started out the day by finding appropriate music on Pandora on my iPhone and then hooking it to our stereo so we had gentle Hawaiian music in the background and then we started reading and talking about the islands of Hawaii.

We started on our United States book work which included two of these pages from Crayola Coloring Sheets and Where in the World is Hawaii? from Homeschool Share. The pages cover where Hawaii is in the world, what the state flag, flower, and bird are, and a couple of other interesting facts (like the fact that Hawaii is still getting bigger, and that most of it's land can not be lived on becuase the islands are active volcanos, etc.)

This is a picture of the Hawaii state flower from the San Diego Zoo that we were just at two weeks ago:

Then I drew a large map on the white board and (after looking up the pronunciations) had the kids repeat after me the island names. Soon after I had them fill in a blank map of the islands from memory. The spellings were humerous, but they got them all correct.

Then we moved on to volcanoes. We learned about the two different types of lava - A a (ah - ah) and Pahoehoe (Pa - Hoy- Hoy), and we learned a little bit about the way the volcanic islands are built.

We talked about how volcanic soil is very fertile soil and thanks to history class, they are well versed in the benefits of fertile soil. Then we moved on to food.

We talked about the crops of Hawaii, and then Pineapples in specific. How and where they grow, what the plants look like and how they are harvested. Alex got to cut up a fresh pineapple, and we each had a slice for a snack.

School activities continued until well into the evening today, and the kids blessed me with making dinner. Pineapple and mango fried rice with Teriyaki chicken, and caramelised pineapple for dessert.

More Hawaii tomorrow!