George Washington: The First U. S. President?

This activity was built in the Learning Magic "Text and Graphics TGRO" template, one component of our newest CD, "Comprehension". In this template, the child is presented with up to ten pages of content. After each reading page there is a related page containing a multiple-choice question which tests and assesses the child's comprehension on the information provided. The George Washington activity has six reading and question sets. In this particular template, text is automatically read aloud. Please note that on the Comprehension CD, the identical content is also available in another template format that requires the child to click on the text box to have it read aloud.

In our work with teachers and educators across the country, we have often heard the comment, "We are having problems getting children interested in reading and learning about history, because they don't see the relevance of the subject matter to their lives." To remedy this, we worked with a group of teachers to explore history in a slightly different way. We thought it would be interesting to raise certain questions in regards to some historical occurences.

One of those was to consider whether George Washington was truly the first President of the United States. While Washington was certainly the first President under the current U.S. Constitution, this activity documents the fact that under the Articles of Confederation, seven presidents of the United States preceeded George Washington. John Hanson was the first president under the Articles of Confederation, and yet few people even know his name.

In working with this activity and others of similar design, we found that children become actively engaged in learning more about history by wanting to know more about possibly mistaken historical recollections. Similar activities on the Comprehension CD include: "The Battle of Bunker Hill", "The Monitor and the Merrimac", and "Teddy Roosevelt and San Juan Hill". For more information, including screen shots from the Comprehension CD, click here.

In all of these activities we are capturing the child's responses in a report and filing the child's work in their appropriate portfolios using the IntelliPics Studio 3® reporting capabilities. (Data recording is not available using the player.) Required Software: IntelliTools Classroom Suite Player® or IntelliPics Studio 3®.