A "nifty" way to learn our 50 states

There is only one song I remember from my elementary public school music classes, and it is this one: Fifty Nifty United States.

Do you all know that one, too? If not, you are so missing out.

That song is how I've been teaching our kids the states. But. Instead of just learning the song, we're also learning where each state is located on the map- which is something I never learned.

Really.

NEVER learned.

(And just so you know, that truth almost didn't make it into this post, because I am truly embarrassed by that fact.)

So guess who else is learning their US geography right now?

Anyway~ I taught them the song, and then once a week, during our morning school time, we'd learn a few states.

The first week: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas.

Second week: After reviewing the states previously learned (the "A" states), we moved on to the next "set": California, Colorado, Connecticut. And so on.

With each group of states learned, we'd point to them on the map that hangs near our kitchen table.

We only officially made it through the O's, I think, but they love the song, and every time they sing it they now try to find all the states, so it's sort of pointless to keep going through them, honestly.

My final plan was to give Ella a blank map and see if she could fill in the states on her own. Mark totally beat me to this, though. Not knowing that I had planned to do this, he printed out a blank map one evening and handed it to Ella to see how she'd do.

Ella correctly filled in 40 states on her first try.

And I'm sure she was singing The Song in her head the whole time.