Learning the States the Fun Way

I saw on Pinterest where another homeschool mom made a sight word game using popsicle sticks. I was just talking to a friend the other day about Geography, the states, capitals and other generalized topics. I had stated how I felt we were ignoring learning the states and capitals, mainly because it is so boring. I have tons of popsicle sticks lying around. Mostly because we do a lot of crafts. I was going to throw them away, but then I decided to make a stick game with them. So, today, and this was way more time consuming than I expected, I took on the task of writing on 50 popsicle sticks. On one side I wrote the state and the abbv. for that state. On the other side, I wrote the year it became a state and the capital. Then I placed them in a clean pizza sauce jar with 50 states written on it. You can see the results in the image. Since we have a states wall map they will have to find the state and the capital. We probably won't start this until after the Christmas holiday. If I can squeeze it in sooner I will. You could do this daily, or weekly, however you want. It is a great memorization tool. You could do this for multiplication, skip counting, sight words, spelling, etc. Be creative with it. If your child is having a hard time learning something, or is just bored to death, try something different and new. That is the beauty of homeschooling. And popsicle sticks are cheap and you could recycle the container. Matter of fact you could go into a lesson about recycling at the beginning of using your new jar game. Huh think of that.