What In the World Have We Been Up To?: Pint-Sized Presidential Fun (& Freebies!)

Happy Sunday evening! Here I am, blogging... (instead of lesson planning... or cleaning... or grocery shopping... doing everything else I should have done this weekend!) Actually we did do our taxes this weekend. After that I felt pretty drained and unable to do anything productive. Is that your feeling too after filing? :)

Anyways, I DID finally get together all the Presidential fun we had last week and put together some fun ideas and freebies for y'all! Here's what we've been up to...

Measuring Abe Lincoln

This was so much fun! First we measured Abe Lincoln and I modeled (once again...) how to measure using feet and inches. Then we broke into partners and practiced measuring each other. Once the students measured each other, they came up to the board and filled out their partner's info on the class data table (sorry, I forgot to snap a picture!) Then I let the kiddos measure me and I modeled using my information to fill out the comparison sheet.

After that the kiddos worked on their own. They turned out great!

Now Abe Lincoln is standing out in our hallway. (I know his beard is funny... I did the best I could!)

Compare/Contrasting George Washington & Abraham Lincoln

We've been reading lots of biographies (which I introduced as a special kind of nonfiction about people)! It was great because my kids had a lot of background knowledge about nonfiction from our Arctic Animals unit (which I never did get around to blogging about...) I especially recommend the biographies from Pebble Plus because they are easy to read and include timelines, which are a great nonfiction text feature.

In this Venn diagram we compared and contrasted facts about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. I laminated the above Venn Diagram so we can use it many times. We used sticky notes because I wanted the kids to be able to take their notes to their seats, to help them with our fun report project...

This idea came from my teammate and I love it! The kiddos used the sticky notes to copy 3 facts about their favorite president, then had to write 2 more facts on their own. Then they used the guided drawing steps to help with their Lincoln/Washington picture. The reports are hanging out in our hallway along with Abe. They look great!