I knew when I saw these that I could create something out of them...

but what? I bought them anyhoo, hoping my creative juices would flow eventually. It did today. I wanted to do something relating to the states and when I saw the 5 mailboxes and the letters-I decided to make a "work" where the child places the correct state under the correct region. I used the regions listed in the book, The Little Man in the Map, by Andrew Martonyi. I reviewed this book for the TOS Review Crew last year, you can read my opinion on it here.



You can use any good book which covers the states and their regions, but I really like this one. There are also a few different ways to split it up the states, but since I only had 5 mailboxes, I needed to put it into that many divisions (thankfully, the LMintheM book did just that). So I now have a fun activity to pop into the workbox, now and again, when we start our 50 states study this fall.



I found the items at the Dollar Tree in the teacher section. You will have to scope your local stores. I didn't see these but 2 weeks ago, and a couple days ago, I did. Hopefully, you will be able to find these too-otherwise, I am sure you can use MS Word images to create something similar.

You need:

2 packs of the room decor: letters (25 per pack)
1 pack of the large Room Decor with the mailboxes and boy/girl stamps
laminate sheets
markers (at least 2 colors)

I listed the full name of the state in blue, the abbreviation in red at the bottom (so the child sees the full spelling and learns the proper 2 letters used for mailing and such). I also put a "self check" on the back of the letters (MW for Midwestern states, for example). That way the child reads the book, learns the regions and then tries to place the proper letters under each mailbox heading. When done, they can flip them over to see if they match. Obviously, if they do not-they made an error.



This is what the final layout looks like when done correctly (the mailboxes can go in any order or from left to right, in proper order you'd see on the map)


The child checks the mailbox door for the region's abbreviation to check the back of the letter.

This will go into our state project collection I am gathering and creating this summer. Oh, since I only have a little boy who will be doing this, I wrote on the boy stamp picture. But if you have girls using it too, then by all means make write the same thing on it, and laminate it as well-that way the child can choose to put the header that matches their gender.