In the wake of the new president’s swearing in last week, I stumbled across an Innauguration Speech Generator. It’s a kind of a cool little Mad Lib style activity where you fill in adjectives, nouns and verbs and it pops them into the appropriate places in an Obama style speech. As an English activity it’s lightweight and fun.
As a Social Studies activity this one is neat, too, because the Mad Lib template is fairly standard for a political speech. It would be fun to analyze it, throwing in your own verb and adjectives, etc, and then compare it to other politicians’ speeches. There’s likely a surprising similarity between them. A lot of rhetoric is thrown around but how much substance is there?
Interestingly, because of the domain (atom.com) hosting the speech generator, it’s blocked at my school. Hopefully it works better in your neighborhood.