President’s day Activities for 1st Grade: Happy Birthday, George Washington!
Happy President’s Day, ya’ll!
In Room 210 in the yellow hallway, it’s Happy President’s WEEK!
So, this week, we are kicking off our new American Contributors unit learning about George Washinton and Abraham Lincoln with fun read alouds, anchor charts, crafts, poems and more! This week’s President’s Day activities all come from this President’s Day Packet.
Today was all about Georgie!
George Washington Read Alouds & Research
George Washington was our first president, so it’s only natural that we started with him! We started by reading a non-fiction book on George Washington. I love this set of Rookie Biographies! They are the perfect level for first graders to understand during a read aloud (and some can even read them independently by now!)
We charted facts about George Washinton as we read about him…on a Washinton hat anchor chart of course! If you’ve been around here long, you know how much I love good picture anchor charts! It helps my early readers quickly find the chart they are looking for and so my first graders use the charts WAY more than they would if all of the charts were on the same white paper!
As we read more texts this week, we will continue to add more details to this chart. (Mainly, we are missing the fact that he is on the quarter and dollar bill!)
President’s Day Activities for George Washington
We started reading our George Washington poem today as well. We will continue to read our Washington poem this week during our whole group reading time and students will add it to their poetry folders on Friday.
Then, students got our unit long, “Who Had a Bright Idea?” booklet. We will fill out each page of the booklet with an American Contributor and his or her important contribution in history. We filled out our Washington page with his main contribution, “He helped our country win its freedom.” We will continue to add the contributions of other important people throughout our unit. This booklet is also great to reread as a class or independent reading time.
During each Common Core Unit, I change out the signs above my group tables to go along with our unit. During this unit, each table group is named after one of our contributors. I made light bulbs out of large yellow construction paper and posted a picture of each of the 6 “focus” contributors on one side. The other side stays blank until we add their contribution. As we wrote George Washington’s bright idea in our booklet, I added his contribution to his light bulb. My George Washington table was *pumped* that I was writing on their table group’s light bulb! It was adorable!!
Later this week, we will be learning about Abraham Lincoln, comparing the two presidents, writing an opinion piece about our favorite president, graphing our favorite president, and making a Lincoln and Washington craft!
Stay tuned…President’s Day isn’t just a day in our classroom. We will be celebrating President’s WEEK all week long!