United States Challenge

 

Greetings!  Happy Wednesday to you!  The sun is shining here in Minnesota this afternoon and it is a welcome sight after a couple of windy, dreary and rainy days.  Our yard is littered in bright red, yellow and pale green leaves.  I think half of the trees in our hard are now bare!

This afternoon the boys are finishing up some work in their Geography notebooks and then we'll begin a craft project to help decorate for our Mexican Fiesta on Saturday night.  Today's project was to make a pinata but the afternoon is quicly getting away from us and so we might post-pone that activity until tomorrow and make tissue paper flowers instead.  Everyone is excited for Saturday!

We'll be starting our Canadian unit on Monday but first I wanted to share some photos with you from a fun United States Map Challenge we did a couple of weeks ago.  If you remember, we were having some internet woes and I was unable to get the pictures posted to the blog.

United States Map Challenge:

• 1 blank map for each student to start with, however, have a few extra copies for starting over in case someone makes a mistake.
• 4 colored pencils per person - choose contrasting colors such as red,  blue, green and yellow.
• A good attitude :o)

The challenge is to color each  state a different color without having any two states next to each other with the same color.

We called Jonathan down to participate in this challenge with us.  He enjoys strategic thinking so I knew he would be good at this challenge.

We all had a different strategy for starting.  Andrew started more on the west coast, Jonathan started on the east coast and Christopher and I started in the middle.  I chose to start with Tennessee which has 8 different states surrounding it.

How do you think we did?  Do you think any of us completed the challenge the first time?

{Christopher trying to only use two colors until he had to switch to a new color}


{Jonathan starting on the east coast}


  {My map}


{Andrew's map}


{Christopher plotting out his colors}



Yay, Jonathan!  He was the first to finish and did it on his first try!
By this point Andrew and I had both made mistakes and had started over.  Christopher was still going strong and almost finished.



Yay!  Christopher is done.  But wait!  While I was taking this picture Jonathan noticed that Christopher hadn't colored the portion of Michigan that sits on top of Wisconsin.  Christopher flipped over his map to look and couldn't believe it when he had both Wisconsin and Michigan colored in black!  Coloring the top portion of Michigan would disqualify him.  

GROAN!

He had made it ALL the way through with no problems up until that point and had to start over.  Christopher was a good sport about it but wasn't happy that I wouldn't let him use his first attempt to help him.

The final challenge results:
Jonathan - 1 attempt
Christopher - 2 attempts
Mom - 3 attempts
Andrew - 5 attempts

There was quite a bit of laughter and groaning as we worked on our maps.  It was a fun challenge and we have a copy waiting for daddy to try too!