President's Day 2012

In celebration of President's Day, we veered from our traditional plans in Bible and History to do a few extra projects.  To start our day, we each took turns looking up and reading from a few Bible verses that show how all governmental authorities, including the presidents, are Providentially put in place by God and that we are to obey them and respect them...whether we agree with them or not!  Although this is certainly not an exhaustive list of all that Scripture has to say about our national leaders, it was a good start for us...Romans 13:1, Daniel 2:21, and I Peter 2:13.

In order to set the stage for the morning's activities and to explain to the littlest two kiddos why we celebrate and who we honor on President's Day, we watched a quirky video on youtube about Washington and Lincoln.

We had done some very extensive reading on the lives of Washington and Lincoln in the previous two years of Truthquest American History, but I thought it might be nice to do a quick recap by reading 

Let's Read About George Washington and Let's Read About Abraham Lincoln, two very simple picture book biographies put out by Scholastic Books.  I let Sweetie Pea and Super Boy each pick which book they'd like to read in order to gather at least 10 basic facts about the life of that particular president to display on a pictorial timeline.  Since Super Boy is still in the "learning to read" phase, I read his chosen book to him and wrote down some notes of the things that he thought would be important to include in a timeline.  Sweetie Pea read and researched on her own.

I glued two large art sheets together, drew a master line across the glued sheets, and then encouraged the kids to use the info that he/she read in their book to create a pictorial view of the important events of the lives of Washington and Lincoln.  They also included major dates and short captions.

After completing their timelines, they had to share them with the rest of the family.  Since no one else had read the books on Washington and Lincoln, it was a nice way for the older two kiddos to be able to tell a few facts about these great leaders.  (I thought it was kind of compelling that Sweetie Pea included the fact that George Washington was homeschooled on her timeline!)

We rounded out our celebration by writing letters to President Obama, telling him that our family prays regularly for him and that we hope that God will help him to make wise, God-honoring decisions for our country.

Letters to the President can be mailed to:

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20500

*This post contains affiliate links.