Magnificent Monday- Rourke's Complete History of our Presidents Encyclopedia

There is only a little bit of time left in Monday, but I wanted to get this one in!  I loved the book set over Sound Adventures, but working with grades kinder-5th grade I was super excited about the set of Encyclopedia's that came in.

4 of the 14 Encyclopedias from Rourke Educational Media 

Each of the books has beautiful pictures, graphics and a plethora of great information.  Each president is introduced with their presidential portrait along with basic information about them.  The encyclopedia then goes into further detail about the president and about the term.  It also includes information about each First Lady.

What I love about these books:

1. So often our students go directly to the computer for information and research.  This is going to be a great tool to work on referencing and finding information (and right at their fingertips!)

2. I love a good table of contents.  I have found it is hard for some students to know how to use the table of contents correctly.  Love this reinforcement!

Great Table of contents

3. The Words to Know that is dispersed throughout each book.  Not only are they important words that need to be focused on, but they also have the pronunciation next to it.

Words to Know

4. The Timeline in each book not only has information, but also pictures to coincide with the information.  Another great tool for students (and teachers) to use.

Timeline in each book

5. The Cabinet Members page is awesome!  It lists the presidents that are in the Encyclopedia and then the various cabinet members while they were in term.

Cabinet Members

There are so many other pieces to this set that I love. My brain is already on overload on how I can use them next year.

Ideas on how I want to use this:
Of course these are going to be a great asset to the classroom for information on presentations, but I am always trying to bring a tech piece into my different lessons.
-Use Mapvivo.com (a super cool tool I just learned about) to track the president's journeys to the White House.
-I have seen many conversations over creating fake facebook walls and this would be a perfect resource for students to use.
-Have students create posters or information using Big Huge Labs.  I love what Mrs. Yollis' class did for Polygons
-Create a Mystery Skype over various presidents and try to guess which president is being discussed

This is wonderful resource from Rourke Educational Media and I can not wait to share it with my students (and come up with more ideas!)  Do you have this set?  How do you utilize it in your classroom?