Book Review: Only in America Activity Book

Summer in the United States is a common time for road trips, and it’s a great time for activities for kids to do in the car and learning about states you might be visiting on your travels.

Only in America Activity Book by Claire Saunders and Heather Alexander focuses on the weireder side of the states, along with activities to make the car or plane ride a little more fun.

The book includes a fruit sudoku game board; fun weather facts; info about some of the biggest, longest, tallest and deepest things in America; a space to make up your own wacky laws; a sports-themed crossword puzzle; cryptid code breaking (and make your own); a math game; facts about weird museums in America; a four-leaf-clover hunt; maze; dino matching; a place to draw something you’d put in a time capsule; a word search with funny place names; a quiz to find words in other words; a diamond hunt; facts about funky festivals (like an annual Jell-o fight); some fun animals, state symbols, largest balls of things, a morbid maze, a number code and a food guessing game.

You’ll also find some fun “would you rather” questions everyone in the car can answer, like would your rather drink pickle juice at Picklefest in Atkins, Ark., or be fed baby food by your blindfolded partner at the National Baby Food Festival in Fremont, Mich.?

As you work through the book you’ll find at least one fun fact for every state, and pass some time on your trip as well.

The answers to any puzzles with correct answers can be found in the back of the book, but lots of these activities are open ended so you can do them again and again or different kids can come up with their own answers.

About the book: 32 pages, paperback, published 2022 by Wide Eyed Editions, suggested retail price $12.99.

A classic manipulative in the preschool and early elementary classroom is the snap cube, also known as math cubes, unifix cubes or unit cubes. These little one inch cubes often come in a set of 100 in 10 different colors, and they snap together so they’re easy to use for all sorts of math learning, measuring and more.

No Time for Flashcards has a cute robot printable to use with cubes to measure the height of each robot. That one is free but they also have other printable cube mats that are a paid resource.

Catherine & Co uses math cubes to teach kids about measuring volume. They make a letter from cubes and then measure the volume (there’s a printable worksheet in the post).

Pattern recognition is another fun and easy activity you can do with the cubes. You can use printables like these from Planning Playtime, or just make a pattern from cubes and have kids repeat it or figure out what comes next. There’s another good set of pattern printables at English Created Resources.

Because there are 10 sets of 10 cubes in a pack, these are great for teaching one to one correspondence, counting, sorting and basic addition and subtraction. English Created Resources has great printable number mats you can use to form the number from cubes and count out the number of cubes that corresponds to that number.

ParenTutor has a great collection of snap cube activity ideas, most of which are just pictures, but it’s work taking a look through the post for ideas for using them at home or in the classroom.

To give just a few of their examples, you can match linked blocks to the corresponding number of pieces, use blocks to find different ways to add up to 10, compare numbers and determine which one is more or less, skip counting and weighing different numbers of blocks.

You can also use unit cubes to learn letters, like with these super cute alphabet mats from Fun Learning for Kids. Kids can trace the letter, make it out of cubes and practice writing a word that starts with that letter.

Of course you can also use them to build things, since they are blocks, and there are tons of pattern mats on Teachers Pay Teachers. I also love these dinosaur themed mats from Lets Go to Learn on Etsy.

Have you read?

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