Scholastic Picture a President

In the beginning of my teaching career I was always looking high and low for new and fun lessons for the students. My mentor/ co-teacher was the one always coming to the rescue with 30 years experience behind her. Until....

I came across a GREAT idea from scholastic.

It was a contest where children from all over drew pictures... very detailed pictures of presidents. The ages were from K-12. So... I decided to have my students create their own pictures of presidents. And it turned out better than i could have ever imagined.

I bought a pack of cards with info from each of the presidents on the back. I believe I got them in the $1 section in Target. I went through and picked out the most popular presidents and had the students randomly draw from the stack to ensure that there were not any duplicate projects. For my first graders I had them research the presidens family, childhood, time in office, birth and death, as well as 3 interesting facts about the president. I provided them with cardstock paper for their projects and showed them the slideshow that I found on scholastic... which I can no longer find online so i assume they removed it. If I find it I will attach it here as well. My only requirement was that the students use the whole cardstock page and make it colorful and take their time. I asked parents to hold back on their involvement. Some helped create an outline of the face and the students colored it. Some let their kids take control...A few weeks later I started receiving these:

Here is the link to the letter I send home to parents. You can adjust it to meet your class needs.

President Letter

Below are a few of my 5th graders projects. I had them type a one age research paper about their president following the same guidelines that I required for my 1st greaders. It was so nice to have a project that can work for both grades with little tweaking.

Bulletin Boards

One of my favorite things to do is to make bulletin boards for the different holidays and themes throughout the year. Here are a few that I made when I taught first.

Gasparilla is a huge deal in the Tampa Bay area and for our lesson about our city's history we learned about Jose Gaspar and made these super cute pirate handprints.

During the winter the students were learning about authors and titles of books and after they read a book they liked they wrote the title and author on these cute mittins. The first year I did this we made a cute fireplace and hung them on it... Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of that one.

At the end of the year we practiced Creative Writing and the Writing Process. First we did a character web and discussed thinking of a name for our main character and then discussed traits for the charater. Students wrote what he/she looked like, what they liked to eat, who was in their family, and favorite things to do. The students wrote rough drafts and then we edited their stories which were all called My Bunny Tale. The students made the bunny look like their character on the outside. The stories had a beginning, middle, and end for a total of 5 pages. Then the students used the space above their writing to illustrate each page. When the students finished their tale we stapled a cotton ball to the back to make a tail.

So now I've really gone and done it....

I took the step... I started a blog. I love sharing teaching ideas and love finding them too... so what better way that to blog about it? Let me first start by sharing my old first grade classroom. Where the "monkeys" all began...

The last photo is of my "No monkeying around" behavior tree... The location where I first had it was hard for the kids to reach so I moved it to here:

The behavior chart is really where the monkey theme stuck... student's monkey clip stays in the tree when they have a good day and "falls" out of the tree when they have a bad day. At the end of the day the students binders have a stamp if the monkey stays in the tree and a highlighted day if it fell with a quick note.I created monthly behavior charts so each month the students behavior is tracked and if the student had a stamp the entire month they were given a special award. I can upload all of these documents as soon as I figure out how to do that!

Here is the rest of my first grade classroom...

The blue tape on the floor is to help the students remember to push their chairs in and also to keep their desk orderly.

...and one more reason the theme stuck with me forever... a homemade monkey cake from a parent...