Grace for President Read Aloud and Activities

 Grace for President is the perfect text for younger elementary students to teach about how our presidential election and the electoral college works.  I knew this would be a great fit for my November Interactive Read Aloud Lessons.  It's the first text that we will read during November.  I used this book to teach using information gained from illustrations and words in a print to demonstrate understanding of its characters, setting, or plot in fiction texts (RL 2.8).  I also paired a nonfiction text from www.getepic.com to teach identifying and explaining how illustrations and words contribute to and clarify a text (RI 2.7).  In this post, I will share some Grace for President activities for in-person and distance learning students.

I would begin the unit by teaching the students the difference between words and illustrations.  I use these posters to show the difference and we discuss what we can learn from both.

The mentor text for this unit is Grace for President for the first three days of the unit.  Each day, I do a mini lesson about using the words and illustrations to help us better understand the characters, setting, and plot.  We use each day to focus on a different story element and compare and contrast the information from the words and illustrations.  This is a great text for that, because you gain different information from the illustrations than you do the words.  All of the mini-lessons and text dependent questions for each day are planned out for you below.

As we are reading each text, I like to jot down key details from the text on these anchor charts.  You can focus on a different story element each day.  With informational text, I focus on a topic within the text.  What is the main topic of this section?  What can we learn from the words?  What can we learn from the illustrations or photographs?

After the read aloud part of the lesson, I always have students respond to the text.  These daily independent tasks are standards-based and great for practice that leads up to a culminating task.  In addition to the culminating task, students will also take a comprehension assessment on Friday over the main text, Grace for President that is also related to the focus standard.  

Since there are two texts, there will be two culminating tasks for students to demonstrate mastery.  On Wednesday, students will summarize Grace for President using this graphic organizer.  They have to use information from the words and illustrations to summarize the story, which demonstrates application of the skill.  I use this as a grade, as well as the comprehension assessment.  That gives me two grades that week on that standard.

 For the informational text, students are given two topics or content words from the book.  They have to describe how the photographs and the words helped clarify their meaning.  I would give those topics to the students and display those pages for students to see during that task.  

In addition to the comprehension tasks, we also include a mentor sentence to tie our language standards into our interactive read aloud.  I include a teacher version and a students version in which they have to cut and paste their sentence together.  We work on this all throughout the week.  You can also incorporate your language standards into their writing when responding to the text.

Since so many are distance learning right now, I have created a digital version using Google Slides TM.  It's included in the November Bundle or you can purchase it separately.  These are very similar to the PowerPoint lessons I use in my classroom, but you can assign slides to your remote learners to complete the independent tasks each day.  Just create another copy for each day of the week and delete the slides you don't want students to have.  You can display the slides from the original copy during your live or recorded lessons.  It will keep you on track and ensure you cover all components of the lesson.  Here are a few of the slides included!  There are five days of lessons that include an agenda, learning target, success criteria, learning video and posters, vocabulary cards with tasks, read aloud, daily questions, daily tasks, exit ticket, wrap up, and self assessments for each of the five days!  These are a lifesaver!

Thank you so much for stopping by!  Please let me know if there's anything I can help you with!

Grace for President Interactive Read Aloud

Digital Grace for President Interactive Read Aloud

November Printable and Digital Bundle

November Digital Only Bundle