Tuesday, March 6, 2012

2 Presidents That Made a Difference... In Our Classroom!

We just got finished with a 2 week long unit on presidents in my class. It's amazing how interested these kids get over people who lived hundreds of years ago. I've been doing foldables throughout the year, but decided to do one on a bigger scale for this unit. For more on foldables, click here.

We learned about Abraham Lincoln for the first week and George Washington the second week. We did many compare and contrast activities, such as a Venn diagram to gain more understanding about each president. We made "pretend" money with the presidents faces on them. We even practiced drawing their faces, in a teacher-led, step-by-step, directed art project. We used these pictures for the outside covers on our foldable "books". 

Here is an example of what one looked like:
In the inside of each cover, I had students draw or label a fact about each president.

The middle section took us the longest to accomplish. I really worked hard on reminding them of the High Five Chart and the editing process. Yes, even kinders can edit their work! In fact, it really helped them to gain some ownership of the writing that they were doing. For more on the High Five process that I created, read my earlier post here.

I was so proud of how they came out. They wrote a lot about each president and really developed an interest in them with the more that each of them wrote!
Here are a few examples of a few writing pieces that we placed in the middle section of our foldable:

Although there are still misspellings after the editing process was complete, I knew that each student had given me their best work. Can you believe that kinder kids are capable of writing so many coherent sentences?! We had a great time with this unit and I will continue to do it in years to come.

1 comments:

vicky1970 said...

Hi Alisa - very cute blog - I just found you and am your newest follower. Come visit me I'm having a lucky 300 giveaway!
Vicky
Traditions Laughter and Happily Ever After

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