O is for Obama by J.M. Holland

 Tuesday will mark a historic first for our country, the swearing in of an African-American as president of the United States. How will you celebrate this historic event in your classroom? In our class, we will continue our regular school day. We will do letter sound activities and sing our alphabet songs (we have five). One of the letters for the day will be O for Obama. We will also cut out a mask of President Obama photo copied on multi-cultural paper. The image came from HeadCandy on the Chicago Tribune website. We will try to maintain the same high expectations we do each day for our students. We will likely also talk about Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement because it is the day after King's birthday. When it gets close to time for the actual inauguration, we will stream the video from CNN or C-Span.

Here are some of the questions I will ask my students:

What does it mean to be the president?

What does inauguration mean?

What are some reasons we are watching this today?

Hopefully we will get some interesting conversation. Do you have any good questions to ask?

Image from: http://flickr.com/photos/fragmented/2767202268/in/set-72157606024276495

Comments

[Jason Roop]

This may be too advanced for the pre-K level, but you may wish to let colleagues know about another free resource, a video feature on Richmond civil rights figure LaVerne Byrd Smith. She wrote a poem in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. the day he died, and has resurrected it in honor of the events this week:

http://tinyurl.com/StyleLaverneSmith0209