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.