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If you’re looking for a fun and educational unit study to do in your classroom in February, consider teaching your students about different national symbols! These fun and engaging American symbols activities for kindergarten are a great way to teach students more about the history of the United States.
Teaching kindergarteners about American symbols is important because it helps to build an understanding of our nation’s history. Since young learners are concrete in their understanding, it’s good for them to learn about how U.S. symbols are used to represent different values, ideals, and even people!
I love to use a variety of American symbols activities to put together a thematic unit for February. Since students have already been learning all about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, it’s easy to make the transition to discussing symbols of America. The symbols that I like to teach in kindergarten are:
As students learn more about these national symbols, it will add to their knowledge of America’s history. Keep reading for some engaging activities that you can use to teach about our national symbols.
A great way to teach students about American symbols is through non-fiction read alouds! There are so many great picture books that feature these symbols. Some of my favorites include “America Is…” by Louise Borden, “The Story of the Statue of Liberty” by Betsy and Giulio Maestro, and “The American Flag” by Mary Firestone.
As you read these books together as a class, you can take notes on a class anchor chart for each U.S. symbol. Students can write the facts in sentence frames as part of an interactive writing activity. Some of the facts you can write about include:
Interactive writing will expose students to new vocabulary in an engaging way! They’ll be excited to share their knowledge with their family and friends. Plus, the information from these anchor charts will come in handy for another fun American symbols activity!
After learning about a variety of American symbols, you can play games together to review them as a class! For example, you could have students hold a small fact poster in front of them (without looking at what they’re holding). Their classmates will take turns giving them clues as they try to guess which symbol they are holding.
Another fun activity would be to display all of your posters or anchor charts around the room. You can give the class clues about a mystery symbol and have them “travel” to the symbol by standing next to the one they think it is. You can keep giving them clues until everyone has made it to the correct symbol. Since the facts are written on the poster, this will encourage students to look for clues in the text!
Finally, pictionary is always a hit in kindergarten! Students can take turns drawing an American symbol to see if their peers can guess what it is. You can show each little artist a simple picture of the symbol to make it easier for them to draw it on the board.
Your students will love putting all of their knowledge about American symbols into an interactive book that they create themselves!
This fun book has a unique page setup. The fact pages for each US symbol are stapled together to create a book. Then, you can attach a cover sheet coloring page to each fact sheet that students can lift to read the facts below.
You can choose to let students write their own sentences based on what they have learned, or you can provide fact sheets with sentence frames that students can fill in. Either way, this activity provides plenty of writing practice for the young learners in your class.
Since there are multiple pages, you can spread out the construction of this book over the course of an American Symbols unit. For example, after reading a nonfiction book about the Statue of Liberty, you can do an interactive writing activity on an anchor chart. Following your interactive writing activity, you can have your students complete their own fact sheet about the Statue of Liberty. Then they can color the Statue of Liberty cover page to include in the book.
You can repeat this sequence over several days until the students have completed all of the pages of the book. If you don’t have enough time to discuss all eight symbols during your thematic unit, you can still assemble the book with the pages you’re able to complete. Your students will be so excited to take their books home to share with their families!
I have created a set of printable resources that you can use to teach about American symbols in your classroom. These activities can be used as part of an American symbols thematic unit. It includes everything you need to put together helpful anchor charts, including book suggestions for your read alouds!
You’ll also find two different types of posters for each symbol: One with bullet point facts and one with a paragraph of facts. These are great for students to reference throughout the unit. This resource also includes everything you need for students to create their own American symbols book to take home.
If you’d like to take a closer look at everything included in this printable resource, you can find it in the A Spoonful of Learning shop or on TPT. I hope you find this resource helpful as you plan to teach about American symbols!
Are you short on time? Be sure to save this post so you can quickly find it later! Just add the pin below to your favorite teaching board on Pinterest. You’ll be able to easily find these activity ideas when you’re planning your American symbol unit study.
These alphabet books will have students dive deep into learning about each letter of the alphabet while eager to see what activity they get to complete next!
