Presidents' Day

I am excited to be linking up with Cole from Teach Glitter Grow to bring you three great things focused around Presidents' Day! February might be a short month but it is a great month to celebrate our Presidents and take time to reflect on their contributions. 

To introduce Presidents' Day I like this short video clip from Scholastic that gives students a few fun facts about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. It gives a quick overview of their lives and I love that this video also makes comparisons to life today and life when these two Presidents lived.

When learning about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln my class researches their life through a QR code scavenger hunt, a timeline, books from our library, and videos from BrainPopJr. and Pebble Go. They take their facts and turn them into short biographies once their research is complete. 

We then construct a interactive bulletin board and their research about these two Presidents launches our Social Studies unit on Famous Americans! 

We use these headers to organize our bulletin board and then add facts to each American to help us learn, compare, and make connections between their lives and contributions.

If you teach Famous Americans, check out this bulletin board set in my TPT store!

To wrap up our President research on George Washington and Abraham Lincoln we compare their lives. It helps students to reflect on their learning and put some of their thoughts into a more concrete graphic organizer. We pull important words from a word bank. I find that using a word bank for this activity really helps because it makes students comparisons unique and gives them more flexibility instead of just cutting and sorting facts that are already written out for them. 

You can also find this comparison in my store for FREE!

I hope you have a wonderful Presidents' Day! Thanks for stoping by!