For my lesson, I will be using the State of the Union in Context which is a website that analyzes words in the state of the Union as said by previous presidents and displays a graph based on the frequency of the word usage.
My lesson would start as an introduction to the presidency and a history of the challenges presidents have had to face during their time in office. The lesson then would be based around the students taking a noun such as a name or place and looking it up with the website. The students would then briefly research the presidents that pop up on the bar graph and what the word means to them. For example, one could look up ‘Afghanistan’ and the four most prominent presidents that appear on the bar graph are George W. Bush, Obama, Carter, an Reagan .
I would then have the student research these presidents briefly and have them find out why that word was so important to their respective presidencies. Students would them present their findings to the class. Overall, this lesson would not only teach students about the different situations that presidents had to face but also could show the similar circumstances that presidents faced such as war and economic depression.