Presidential Bio Poems

With just over a month until President's Day 2014, I wanted to repost this entry. I am looking forward to doing this project with my class again this year, and I thought other people might be looking for an alternative to the run-of-the-mill "President Report" as well. 

Have you ever done bio poems with your students? I love doing them with my classes. We do them as a "getting to know you" activity every September. They are always hanging on the bulletin board when parents come for Back-to-School night, and everybody loves them. 

Last year we did our personal bio poems in September, but then I decided to put a new twist on the bio poem template, and I reworked the format so that the kids could write presidential bio poems for part of a unit we did on the novel "The Kid Who Became President"by Dan Gutman. The presidential bio poems the kids wrote were fabulous, and we ended up displaying them as a Presidential Timeline for the whole school right before Election Day.

As President's Day quickly approaches, I wanted to share a sample poem with you. If you like the sample below, and recognize the value of having your students synthesize research about an assigned president in this creative format, visit  http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Stacy-Schwab and check out the Presidential Bio Poem packet you can purchase there. You can get a poem template, a student work sample, and a scoring rubric just in time for President's Day. I assigned the poems as an at-home project, but they can just as easily be completed in class. I hope you'll take a look at the packet.