Presidents of the United States Family Home Evening Lesson

Note for November 2024: The presentation has been updated with a slide for Donald Trump’s second term and 47th president of the United States. I created this presentation as a Family Home Evening (FHE) lesson for my kids, with one slide summarizing the life and administration of each President of the United States of America. It sparked great learning and conversations in our family, and I hope it does the same for you.

See complete Family Home Evening Lesson Archive here.

Background Impetus for Creating this Lesson

It was fall of 2023 and we were having a family conversation about politics and the name of an early president of the United States came up. I don’t remember which president it was now, but in my mind, it was one my kids should have been familiar with. They claimed they had never heard of that president. It was then that I realized I needed to step up and teach the kids more myself since they were not getting a thorough education in American History in our lovely public schools.

I started working on this around the beginning of 2024 and here we are in June and I’m glad to have it finally finished and posted. We’ve actually been doing about one FHE per month from this slide deck over the past few months. In a given evening, we will generally go through about five presidents, so if you pace yourselves similarly, I anticipate it will take about nine lessons to get through our 46 presidents of the United States.

Most of my kids have enjoyed the lessons, and it has turned out to be really good in supplementing their history education. Each session has led to really good discussions with the kids. Since it is only one slide of bullet points per president, the presentation can’t go into a lot of detail, but reading through the facts and events of each presidents’ life and political administration has brought up questions in the kids minds and led to great family discussions about the history of our great nation, the men who have been it’s leaders, government policies, and other important subjects.

Purpose of the FHE Lesson

My purpose in creating and delivering this FHE lesson was:

• Help kids understand history (names, circumstances, highlights, lowlights)
• Focus mostly on positives and strengths, though we understand that all these men have had their flaws
• Learn about what made these presidents good leaders and also learn from their mistakes
• Gain inspiration from the remarkable achievements of past leaders as we all strive to be better leaders within our own sphere of influence

Please know that I have tried very hard to be politically neutral in the presentation of the facts of the lives and circumstances of this presidents. I hope whether you align yourself with the Republicans or Democrats, Libertarians or Independents, that you will find this presentation informative and helpful. Of course, if you find any errors or have suggestions, please send them my way as I will undoubtedly revise the presentation file in the future. Thanks.