In our country, January and February lend themselves to topics of changing the world to make it a better place.George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr fought for what they believed in and guided our world to where it is today: ever changing with 3 steps forward and a couple backwards but still heading in the right direction. Sharing their stories with students can open the door for many lively discussions and debates and lead them to answer “How will they leave their mark on the world?”

Journal entries and discussions are a typical assignment, but what if you left the realm of predictability and expanded to those that excite the children in different ways. Here are a few for you to try:

• record an original play using your mobile devices
• create a poster in Publisher, Pixie or an interactive white board program voicing your support of the leaders
• using an interactive white program, each student can create a page/slide/flip chart to portray a certain aspect of change for the better
• create a stop motion animated film using claymation videos showing how to make characters but this can be applied to anything you want in your video
• create a presentation in Animoto or Prezi   (since both of these require a log in, you can use a “dummy” gmail account for each student)