Fun with Presidents, Geography and Math

Ever since the election, Brian has become obsessed with the presidents. I have had to find coloring pages of each of the presidents...he carries them around with him. He has conversations with them. I've gotten a book, Yo, Millard Fillmore from the library based on some recommendations from the 4 Real board. He now knows the presidents in their order. His favorite president is Andrew Jackson; followed by Martin Van Buren (b/c his mommy did a report on him in 4th grade), and Ronald Reagan (one of his daddy's favorites). He quizzes people on who their favorite president is. He's actually moved on to the vice-presidents and can't understand why there aren't any coloring pages available for these guys. Can you tell he's a little obsessed?


So I have decided to capitalize on his enthusiasm. I created this little game today that combines the presidents, some geography and wrapped up with a nice little bow of math.


I started with a blank wall map of the U.S.A that I picked up at our local Education Station the other day. I printed off a list of all the presidents with their home states. And with these items in hand, we began our fun!
You can see some of Brian's coloring pages at the top of this picture. As he told me which president came next in line, he would pull the coloring page out. We then placed a sticker on the state a president was from when he was elected. The boys knew a fair number of the states just by sight, but those that they weren't familiar with, we had our trusty place mat map which they found the state on and then matched it up to the big map.

Brian and Sean showing off their good work (and some coloring pages to boot!)

Of course Colin didn't want to be left out of the picture taking - he's saying "Taft"!

After putting all of our stickers on, I had Brian identify the state and tell me how many presidents came from that state. We then placed the states in order from the most presidents came from that state down to counting how many states have never had a president come from them. The highest number of presidents was 7 from New York - although as a caveat to this, we counted Grover Cleveland twice. Ohio and Virginia were next in line with 6 each. There were 12 states only boasting 1 president each, and 29 sad states that have never had one of their sons lead our country.

Here's Brian showing off his map, his tally sheet and yet another president coloring page. The great thing about today is that the boys learned a ton of stuff, but if you asked them, I bet they would say they just had fun!