President Ideas

Our 2nd grade has always done a unit on Presidents called Yipes Stripes. Each year, we look for new ideas to incorporate into this unit. In the past, 6th graders have helped each 2nd grade boy (we are an all boys' school) create a powerpoint slide about their assigned president. The slides are then combined and the teachers play the slideshow in their classroom on Yipes Stripes day. This year, we are not doing a powerpoint slide. The 2nd grade teachers have seen glogster and each 6th grader will now help each 2nd grader create a glog about their president. We will then save their glog as a diigo bookmark and save it to a list under each teacher's name. Once all the glogs are on the diigo list, we will "play as webslides" off the diigo page and that will be each classroom's slideshow that plays for parents. I am very excited about the possibilities since the boys can work on this at home (with parent approval, of course!)

Another idea I had while driving home from school was a Presidential Wordle. Each boy can create a wordle of his assigned president's inauguration speech. This will help each student quickly see what was popular and important during the time of his assigned president. I just shared this with the teachers today and I think a few may use it. I found a link of the president inauguration speeches and the boys just need to copy the text from their president's speech, then paste it in to the wordle create page. The larger the words, the more the president used that word. Can't wait to see if anyone uses that idea and how the students react. The wordle pictured here is James Monroe's first inauguration speech turned into a wordle.