President’s Day Activities

President’s Day is coming up soon, but how should you celebrate it with your middle school students? As a teacher, celebrating President’s Day with your students is a great way to help them understand the role of the presidency in our government and past presidents’ impact on our country. This post will highlight several President’s Day activities and teaching ideas that you can do with your students that are no-prep or low-prep! Even if you don’t teach government on a regular basis, we hope you’ll find these activities to be a meaningful addition to your teaching.

President’s Day Lesson Plan

Our preferred President’s Day lesson plan is having students make a selection of historical baseball cards about past Presidents of their choice. In this activity, students must include the President’s name, a sketch or image of them, the dates that they were President, their political party, three major accomplishments, and their legacy. This information is often in the back of textbooks (or mixed in throughout them), but we recommend having access to computers for the best results. If you are a U.S. history teacher, you can continue to use these baseball cards throughout the year to correspond with the presidents in office during each unit!

An alternative idea to help your students learn more about the Presidency could include having your students write a letter to the current President (or a past President) with ideas about how to improve the country or the future. For an additional option, hold a mock presidential election in class. This is a great way to teach students about the election process and the importance of voting. Divide the class into teams, with each team representing a different candidate. Students could research their candidate, create campaign posters and speeches, and hold debates to decide who will be the class president.

President’s Day Worksheets

While the previously listed activities may require some extra preparation, our two-sided President’s Day Activity Sheet is a printable worksheet with no extra effort needed. Print double-sided, and you are good to go! There are three different activities included: a presidential logic puzzle, a presidential math activity, and a word search. Take a closer look at the resource here or in the image below.

Celebrating President’s Day

While President’s Day happens once a year, you can certainly celebrate the holiday year-round. In this case, you might like this set of printable President posters. This complete set not only includes all of the past Presidents with some additional information in several sizes to display around your classroom but also some presidential flashcards. This can be a helpful tool for your students and could even be used for memory games or guessing games.