Duck for President ( Books Teachers Love )

February… the month of love. And for perfectly good reason because oh. my. goodness. Who doesn’t love a good read aloud?! 🙂

Before we know it, February is going to be here. Say what! And while it might be really hard to think about at the moment, it’s never too early to start ordering some books to prep for February. SAAYYY WHHAAAT!

Raise your hand if you love you some Amazon Prime for buying books? See, I knew we were friends for a reason!

February 15 is President’s Day in the United States, and this Duck wants to run for President. He started out on the farm, worked his way up to farmer, then governor, and now wants to run our country. Read this story with your students to find out if Duck becomes the next President, and if he does, how he feels about it.

A New York Times Best Seller and receiver of the NYT Best Illustrated Children’s Book Award, this read aloud is full of colorful illustrations that you and your students are sure to love. 

Doreen Cronin is the author of Click, Clack, Moo and many other great stories about these silly farm animals. She also wrote Diary of a Worm.

I use this read aloud to begin our President’s Day talk.
This introduces the process of how a person (or duck) becomes President in a fun way for my kids… because who wouldn’t want to read about a duck becoming President.

Then we start talking about the book by sequencing the events of the story. First… Then… Next… Last. This is a skill a lot of my friends have to work on as IEP goals, so it’s a great way to practice the skill.

Inferring is another important skill we work on a lot in my classroom, so of course we take the opportunity to infer and describe the story.

My favorite part of reading this story is the mock election we hold after. Instead of voting for real people, I have my students vote for different animals from the story. I print clip art in poster size and hang it on the front board to start. We name the animals, describe the animals, and we try to talk about why they think each animal would make a good president (this is difficult for my friends, so it’s mostly me standing in front of the class telling my students characteristics of each animal).

Then it’s time for them to cast a vote!

After each student has voted, we graph the results.

This usually takes 2 days to complete. We typically spend an block on our mock election, but this can then lead us in to talking about actual US Presidents and why we celebrate President’s Day, as well as jobs within a community.