Reading Lessons for President's Day

Presidents' Day (in the United States) is tomorrow. ReadWorks offers a collection of articles and question sets to support your lessons about President's Day. ReadWorks is offering articles and question sets are available for every grade from Kindergarten through twelfth grade. Every article is indexed with a lexile score. You can download the articles and question sets as PDFs.

Applications for Education
Some of the topics covered by the ReadWorks Presidents' Day articles include the story of George Washington chopping down a cherry tree (Kindergarten lesson), the role of the President as outlined by the Constitution (high school lesson), and a letter from Jackie Robinson about civil rights (middle school lesson).

For more resources about Presidents' Day, check out Larry Ferlazzo's ever-growing list of Presidents' Day resources.

The US Presidents in Google Earth

Monday is President's Day in the United States. In celebration of that day, Google has published a kmz file containing images and links to information about each former President of the United States. You can download the file and launch it in Google Earth or preview it here. The file shows where each president was from, offers an image of each president, provides a link to more information about each president, and shows how many states were in the Union when each president was elected.

Applications for Education

In the past Google offered some good suggestions for using Google Earth on President's Day. This is what they suggested:

• Explore the White House, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial and other historical monuments in 3D and have students explain how architecture is used to honor people, concepts and establishments
• View a 3D model of Valley Forge National Park in Google Earth
• View a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln and map the areas where slavery ended, as well as the areas that were not initially covered by this executive order
• Discuss the famous painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” by German American artist Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze and use the ruler tool in Google Earth to measure the width of the Delaware River.

How to Get Add-ons in the New Version of Google Forms

Last week Google announced support for Add-ons in the new version of Google Forms. Lack of support for Add-ons had been holding me back from making the switch. This week I switched and many others did too. One question that I have gotten in my email about the new version of Forms was about how to install Add-ons in the new version. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to find and install Add-ons in the new version of Google Forms.