Always my little Showman, Damien decided he was going to learn the song. The problem was his book divided the states into geographic regions, like any "normal" curriculum. (Apparently, normal is boring.)
Every day, we'd work with his flashcards, adding another state and capital. Some were pretty easy - Trenton in New Jersey, our home state. Others...well, good luck figuring out "Des Moines" when you're a phonetic reader!
We'd shuffle them up each day, so he got used to identifying them in different orders, not just the order his book presented them. (After all, when you go to address an envelope, you need to know the abbreviation for Arkansas without having to rattle through sixteen other states first!) Slowly, he made his way cross-country, from New England to the Pacific states. Even though the states were studied in geographic order, it seems fitting that the last state to study was our newest state, Hawaii (capital: Honolulu).He still worked on learning the song by heart, but I told him he could not sing it with his flashcards until he had learned all fifty states. Hawaii memorized meant he was ready to sing on his own.
Mom's job was to put them in song order. Thank goodness for Google - I could find the lyrics written and not have to start/stop a video while I shuffled through all the cards to find the right one to place next. We recruited Luke to be the cameraman, since I couldn't flip cards AND video at the same time. (I'm Mom, not a magician.)
Not bad, huh?
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