The Sixth State

I'm no artist, so my clue of a hand-drawn whale to guess which state joined the Union yesterday wasn't much help to the residents.

1. It joined the union on February 6th, 1788
2. Mother Goose (real surname Vergoose) and Dr. Suess came from there
3. poet Emily Dickenson was a native
4. Louisa May Alcott wrote her famous "Little Women" there
5. their "big dig" has been causing headaches since 1991 but should turn out to be an underground highway
6. Paul Revere was from there. I learned he was a silversmith
7. two of their famous islands are Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard
8. I went whale-watching there in middle school
9. they have the oldest college, Harvard
10. the capitol is Boston
11. they produce a great deal of cranberries
12. I find it funny that their state flower is the Mayflower
13. they were founded by the Puritans
14. they had a famous Tea Party that set the state for the Revolutionary war

We talked a lot about what we knew about Massachusetts, what we didn't know, what we had visited and what we would be interested in visiting. As we learned more facts about Massachusetts I wrote them on the board until it was full and everyone had an answer when I asked what the most interested fact they picked up was.