Connecticut

My 2nd graders now know how to spell Connecticut by pronouncing it dragged out as "connect-i-cut." The more things change, the more they stay the same. If we ever visit CT we now know we'd like to see the Mark Twain house, visit the Mystic Seaport Museum, and hopefully catch some fall foliage. 

Books:

• N is for Nutmeg: A Connecticut Alphabet

• Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Beecher Preachers by Jean Fritz

• My Heart Glow: Alice Cogswell, Thomas Gallaudet, and the Birth of American Sign Language by Emily McCully

• Mark Twain: An American Star by Elizabeth McLeod

• (he lived the end of his life in CT; we may bring him up again for Missouri [birthplace] or one of the locations where Huck Finn takes place).

• Who Was Mark Twain? by April Jones Prince

• Noah Webster and His Words by Jerri Chase Ferris

• Yankee Doodle America: The Spirit of 1776 from A to Z by Wendell Minor 

• A Kids' Guide to the American Revolution by Kathleen Krull

• This one is text heavy but could be a good resource.

• Who Was P.T. Barnum by Kirsten Anderson

• Welcome to Felicity’s World, 1774 by Elizabeth Gourley

• Life During the Revolutionary War by Bonnie Hinman

• Eli Whitney by Karen Bush Gibson

• Native Peoples of the Northeast by Barbara M. Linde

Art Project:

New England Fall Foliage

Partially because it was seasonally appropriate when we reached CT, and partially because fall foliage does seem to be iconic, we decided to do art work to depict this. I found this project online. We did not have acrylic paints as suggested, so we first sketched the tree outlines in pencil, then filled in the trunks / branches with brown oil pastel, then watercolored the sky light blue, and finally used tempra paints and q-tip bundles for the leaves / grass as described on the project page. They came out really cool looking, as you can see.