Learning the history of the Arkansas Flag

I was intrigued by the history of the Arkansas flag as I researched Arkansas for our homeschool geography lesson.  As we learn about different states and countries, we don’t often think about the why’s behind a flag.

Here’s what I found out about the Arkansas flag

• The large diamond is to represent Arkansas being the only state to produce diamonds.
• The 25 stars inside of it are because Arkansas is the 25th state to enter the Union.
• The top star in the middle is because Arkansas was part of the Confederacy.  The lower 3 stars are for France, Spain, and the United States, the other 3 countries that had ruled over Arkansas.  Information from 50 state flags

Geography assignment: Design a flag for your own state

After teaching them all about the Arkansas flag, we took the time to design our own flags.  Since our homeschool co-op consists of kids ranging in age from my kids (kindergarten) up to 4th grade most assignments have two different difficulty levels.  For the younger kids all they had to do was draw a flag and explain out loud why they chose their design.  The older kids were required to write a sentence or two explaining what their thoughts were.

I got Mac playing with Batman, and Robot Boxing from another kid (who’d just spent the last hour telling me all about Robot Wars).  It just went downhill from there, ending with Princess who just sat there and stared outside.

I could tell everyone’s minds weren’t really on the lesson as we went through because we had some really gorgeous weather outside, so I cut everything short and sent them outside to play.

There’s some battles you can’t win, so I sent them outside and they played……..