President and Government FREEBIES!

Oh man have we been hit with some SNOW today.  If only it had come during the night there might have been a snow day.  I'm DYING for a snow day- I can only cross my fingers that the snow will continue through the night making it just impossible for the buses to get to school in the morning.. wink wink ;)

So, I am majorly behind on my posts for some reason!  This will have some of our president projects as well as a president/government freebie (sorry for the long post!)

We started off with a president research project and we had our Librarians help!  Each child drew a president's name randomly.  They researched about that president in books, encyclopedias and websites.  They compiled their facts into a paragraph and typed it into Power Point.  I know what you are thinking... second graders doing Power Point??  I actually said to the librarian... you are NUTS!  But you know what??  They did it and they did a REALLY good job!!  

She taught them how to copy and paste a picture into the slide and they typed their entire paragraph too!!  Finally, they read their paragraph into the Power Point!  It turned out AMAZING!!

We got our Art teacher involved too!  The kids learned how to draw their president... and can I say that they also turned out amazing.  Our Art teacher is all kinds of wonderful!  The art work was scanned into the Power Point and then they were hung in our hallway!

 

We have quite the artists!

This is pretty sweet! :)

While all that was going on, we focused our attention to good 'ole George and Abe.  We read from these fantastic books by Barbara Knox:

I love the simplicity of these books which makes it easy for us to "take notes."

Then the kids used their notes to help them complete a timeline:

Which leads me to the FREEBIE!  I put our note taking sheet, two time lines, AND our branches of government tree all in one little pack!  I realize that this maybe a tad bit late for some of you- print and file it away for next year.  OR if you are studying text structure- sequencing events is a biggie... practice with a recent topic! :)

Here is a look at the freebie:

 

(click here to get a copy)

I added our "tree," which really helped my students understand the three branches of government.  I used a GREAT Smart board lesson (from Smart Exchange) to help the kids find facts to go under each heading.  You can see the Smart lesson {here}

Phew!  We were BUSY learning about those presidents! :)

Now I am working on Black History Month (just squeezing it in :)

I am using my unit that has everything I need:

(it is on SALE right now!!)

Stay tuned as I will be sharing some great math posts about teaching double digit addition without the traditional algorithms!!  This has been quite a learning experience for both my students and me!!  Be on the look out for that as well as Dr. Seuss' birthday (March 2nd)!!

If you missed the color test (super fun and great for your team of teachers) click here to grab it!!