Celebrating American Symbols

This week we finally finished our unit on American symbols.  We began learning about American symbols around Citizenship Day which is the 17th of September.  We started the unit out by reading We the Kids by David Catrow and listening to the Preamble of the Constitution on School House Rocks.  Afterwards, we learned about the American flag and the meaning of each color and what the flag represents.  The students also learned why we say The Pledge of Allegiance every morning.  In addition, they learned what the pledge means.  Afterwards, we spent a little time on each of the American symbols, reading articles about them in shared reading.  We just had to finish this unit off with a little American celebration.  After learning about some of the American symbols, we made flag cookies out of graham crackers, icing, twizzlers, and sprinkles.  The kids had a blast.  As we made the cookies we discussed the meaning of the flag again.  They did a great job remembering that the stars stood for the 50 states, the stripes stand for the first 13 colonies.  They even remembered that red stands for courage, white stands for making good choices, and blue stands for justice.  Here are some pictures of our celebration.