PreK-6 Menu of
Classroom Activities:
President Obama’s Address to Students
Across America
Produced by Teaching Ambassador Fellows, U.S. Department of Education September 8, 2009
As the President speaks, teachers can ask students to write down key ideas or phrases that are important or personally meaningful. Students could use a note-taking graphic organizer such as a Cluster Web, or students could record their thoughts on sticky notes. Younger children can draw pictures and write as appropriate. As students listen to the speech, they could think about the following: What is the President trying to tell me? What is the President asking me to do? What new ideas and actions is the President challenging me to think about? Students can record important parts of the speech where the President is asking them to do something. Students might think about: What specific job is he asking me to do? Is he asking anything of anyone else? Teachers? Principals? Parents? The American people?
After the Speech: Teachers could ask students to share the ideas they recorded, exchange sticky notes or stick notes on a butcher paper poster in the classroom to discuss main ideas from the speech, i.e. citizenship, personal responsibility, civic duty.
Students could discuss their responses to the following questions: What do you think the President wants us to do? Does the speech make you want to do anything? Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us? What would you like to tell the President? Teachers could encourage students to participate in the Department of Education’s “I Am What I Learn” video contest. The Department will invite K-12 students to submit a video no longer than 2 min, explaining why education is important and how their education will help them achieve their dreams.
Create posters of their goals. Posters could be formatted in quadrants or puzzle pieces or trails marked with the labels: personal, academic, community, country. Each area could be labeled with three steps for achieving goals in those areas. It might make sense to focus on personal and academic so community and country goals come more readily. Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals. Write goals on colored index cards or precut designs to post around the classroom.Interview and share about their goals with one another to create a supportive community. articipate in School wide incentive programs or contests for students who achieve their goals.
Write about their goals in a variety of genres, i.e. poems, songs, personal essays. Create artistic projects based on the themes of their goals.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this post are intended as humor and are not those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of Dvorak Uncensored… kinda sorta.
Want to know the funny part?
Many of the folks who voted for this guy won’t mind this at all. They don’t know or care where there children are, or what they are doing, or, for that matter, who they are….
They won’t mind until the nObama Youth bust down their doors and haul them off for re-education….
And that’s just the non-minorities….
My kids are out of his reach…. If not, this would be a superb argument for Home Schooling….
What do you think the President wants us to do?
Who cares. The question is, why isn’t he doing what we want him to do?
Does the speech make you want to do anything?
Yeah, elect someone who will do what I want.
Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us?
Yes, but we won’t cause that’s not the way a democracy works. He does what we ask not the other way around.
What would you like to tell the President?
Get off your ass and do what we put you there to do or hit the highway.
I can’t wait to see what the students of conservative parents draw.
And I can’t wait to see how many of them get detention.
#2 GF it the nail on the head. The President needs to do what we tell him to do, not the other way around. If he can’t get that through his head, he doesn’t deserve to be President.
#2 & #4 got it right, he needs to do what WE want! Get back to passing health care reform!
Statism
Next week, Al Gore has time booked to chat with the kiddies.
Be afraid…
Is this for real? Do we need a BS meter on this one?
If it *were* real, I would have thought that Bobbo, Phydeau, and the other fellow travelers here would have already prostrated themselves at the Obama altar.
And bad-mouthed Republicans/Bush.
The kids will end up with a stuttering problem if Obomba’s teleprompter fails during the speech.
wow. no posts from bobbo, yet, stating how it’s good for our kids to be REQUIRED to work 100 hours of community “service” per school year?
I bet that comes in the next five posts…
“We” want Obama to stay out of our lives. And, to quote a brave marine speaking to congressman Baird, “keep your hands off my kids!”
Um… so the President is supposed to take a poll on every decision and go by majority rule?
I don’t THINK so.
The President isn’t there to do what we want with everything.
We’re supposed to elect someone whom we trust to make the decisions HE (or she) thinks is best.
@wygit
whoa, dude. you want an elected king, not a President.
#10, Now that’s funny, I don’t care who you are.
y’know, I don’t see anywhere in this material that it addresses his “president-elect” promise to compel our kids to work those 50 gratis hours of community “service”. Is that not what this is about? I guess I got misled by the (excellent) graphic.
I guess if you can’t get the parents to listen to you, you just use the kiddies…
So, “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country” has been rendered meaningless? Great.
Where’s our education czar?
hey, get this…
from the US Dept of Education website:
The proposed requirements would define the criteria that a State educational agency (SEA) must use to award school improvement funds to local educational agencies (LEAs) with the lowest-achieving Title I schools that demonstrate the greatest need for the funds and the strongest commitment to use those funds to provide adequate resources to their lowest-achieving Title I schools in order to raise substantially the achievement of the students attending those schools.
Basically, this says it defines guidelines for giving federal money to schools in inverse proportion to the quality of education they’re giving. Schools that perform well get shafted, while schools that tank and produce juvenile detention alumni get a cash cow.
Nice plan.
Hey anyone remember an After School movie titled “The Wave”???
you folks are crazy
This sounds like a good lesson plan to get kids to review and discuss what they head in a speech. I’d love them to do it with Rush/Beck/O’reilly old JFK and yes even the big H from WWII Germany speeches. Or how about a rant from one of you fellow posters. I bet many of the folks who show up here could benefit from this lesson.
There is nothing in this about compulsory behavior from the students involved or even that it is to be a required by any schools or classes.
Students would be welcome to disagree with the whole content of the speech the point is that they heard exactly what was being said, I like it.
And after the speech, the teacher will provide grammar lessons to the students, pointing out that you should not start every sentence with “Look”, that “gonna” means “going to”, and when the President says “do as I say” that doesn’t mean he’s going to do the same.
What if President Bush had done this? What if President Bush had given a speech directed at government school kids and required them to listen and write/draw what he was telling them, then require them to produce propaganda posters in support of his policies?
The image at the top of the article is definitely appropriate considering what Obama is going to do.
Makes you wonder if we are looking at American’s last black president or America’s first dictator.
You be the judge.
#24, my guess is, if Bush had done this, most schools would have refused to show it, claiming the it is wrong to have students watch a political speech.
Of course, later, after the speech had been made, the schools would show it to students and point out all the mistakes Bush would have made.
You know what boggles my mind, is how people get this idea that America is going to somehow become Nazi Germany if we don’t pay attention, do this or that, protect yourself from Obama, pray to FOX, and on and on. I don’t buy it anymore. Our government is a balance of powers. If the system was flawed, it would have crumbled in 1777. We are never going to become Nazi Germany or anything like it. Save your breath if you are going to say “oh that’s how they got sucked in”, that all happened in another country, not in America. We will forever be free, and are becoming more free every day. Difficult cases go to the supreme court, and their outcomes have been keeping us free to arm bears, as well as ourselves, abort unwanted pre-children, and say what we want when we want if we are Jehovah Witnesses standing in front of supermarkets. What fuckin more do you want?
OhGodNawtAgain said,
‘What fuckin more do you want?”
They want their side to be in charge again
yo folks don’t worry it will happen in 2012 or 16 or 20 most of you will still be around and the country will be doing about the same as is has for the last 233 years. You can bet some of us will then be pretty unhappy then with the Palin/Joe the Plumber administration. Until then get use to disappointment your team is not in the decider chair any more. Your best bet put out good ideas and win an election or two instead of just trying to make the country fail.
gesh then then .. i need a proof reader
# 28 OhGodNawtAgainsaid “If the system was flawed, it would have crumbled in 1777.”
During our revolutionary period (war and post war) there was a convergence of the stars and planets (or whatever you might believe) that brought together a group of people that hasn’t happened before, or since.
Find one politician during the past 100 years or so that might hold a candle to Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, The Adams, George Washington and the others responsible for the existence of the US of A.
If you don’t believe that a Hitler, Stalin or Mao could come to power here, you need to think again.
Just my humble opinion.
#28 “If the system was flawed, it would have crumbled in 1777.”
It did crumble in the years after the American Revolution. That Articles of Confederation defined our flawed government and we had to have the Constitutional Convention in 1786. Only then did we have a sustainable government. It had its hiccups, the Civil War, but the system has pretty much worked until then.
Look at history #28