Grade 6: Social Studies

Road Trip!  

The United States has a diverse landscape—everything from deserts to bayous, mountains to grass prairies, mesas to glaciers—and a wide array of national parks, monuments, historical sites, museums, and cities. At Mesa Verde National Park, in southwest Colorado, you can visit remains of ancient dwellings built into cliffsides by the Pueblo people as early as 500 CE. At the Harriet Tubman National Historic Park in western New York, you can tour the house where Tubman lived after retiring as an Underground Railroad conductor. In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, you can touch the side of a building that still has bullets from the infamous Civil War battle embedded in the brick.  

There is so much to see and learn from in the United States. Help your sixth grader plan a dream road trip, hitting at least three historical sites, important cities, national parks, or national monuments in the US. Where do they want to visit? What can that site teach them about US history?  

Here are some things your child can do to plan a US history road trip:  

• Map out a route and determine how long the trip will take. 
• Create a daily itinerary detailing what they would do at each site.  
• Research regional foods near the places you would visit and make a plan to try some. 
• Challenge them to include one or two little-known places, or places they have never heard of before.  

Learning that it is possible to travel around and visit iconic national landmarks and places where monumental events occurred is empowering for kids. And who knows, maybe this itinerary can become a real family road trip one day