Sunday, March 9, 2014

Right On Time for President's Day!.........Right?

Greetings, Strangers!

I admit, my promises of blogging more often have proven to be false.  I want to blog, I really do!  I just find myself getting all caught up in school, grad school, friends, family, and miscellaneous other things and blogging keeps getting pushed to the side!  Just last week I had a grad school project due, parent teacher conferences, and a formal observation, phew!  I really wish I was one of those miracle people who could get it all done and have extra time at the end of their day to, oh I don't know, paint their nails and work out but hey, I'm just not!

And because it happened so recently (cough, sarcasm, cough), I thought I'd dedicate this post to....President's Day!  I have had a schedule of things and topics to blog about and this post, I figured, could still be used next year or for any government units you have coming up!

I am always so surprised and amused by how excited and interested my kids are in real people in history.  Seriously, they are always SO intrigued and begging to learn more!  Every year!  I love it!  This year was no different...the presidents were, once again, the most interesting thing EVER!  

We started by reading some non-fiction books about our very own 16th president, Abraham Lincoln.  Do any of you have the Scholastic Easy Reader Biographies (purple book)?  I tell you...these are the BEST biographies for primary kids.  They are super easy to follow, include simple non-fiction text features, and really interest the kids. 

After we did several read alouds, we used all of our new knowledge to write about good ol' Honest Abe and add our writing to our projects out of Amy Lemons' President's Day Freebie Pack!  I had my kiddos write a topic sentence and then use sentence stems that I provided for them to complete their writing.  They could use the following sentence starters:
Abraham Lincoln was _____________________.
Abraham Lincoln wanted ___________________.
Abraham Lincoln lived _____________________.

They did an awesome job with their writing!  Unfortunately, however, I didn't take any pictures of the individual Abe projects.  Later on in this post you will be able to see pictures of them hanging with our George Washington projects.

Which brings me to our next president that we studied...Mr. George Washington himself!  We started out by reading the Easy Reader Biography below.  Then, we watched (and re-watched by request) the George Washington brainpopjr video.


We used sticky notes to write down facts and questions we had.  We have been working on types of sentences, so I thought this was a perfect opportunity to have kids write a telling sentence or an asking sentence about George Washington to add to our chart!  They always love using stickies, so this was just mind-blowingly fun!



We finished up our Washington learning by recording our learning and making this George craft inspired by The First Grade Parade.  I did the whole paint thing last year and just didn't have time this year to wait for paint to dry.  We had to wham-bam our Washington craft out in a very small amount of time, so the paint just didn't fly this year!  Either way, I think they turned out super cute and the kids sure loved making them!


And here's our presidential crafts and writing hanging up in the hallway above our cubbies!





Welp, until next time...I PROMISE it will be soon!!









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