School Memorization Challenges, Grades 1-3

Grades 1 and 2 Challenge Poems

I am the Statue of Liberty

I stand in the waters of New Jersey.

I am proud, straight, and tall

As I hold high my torch for all.

Martin Luther King said, “Let Freedom ring. Let Freedom ring.”

From every mountain and every hill

Until freedom rings

We won’t be still.

Abraham Lincoln, kind and good

Was honored and loved by many.

To help us remember this president.

We put his face on our penny.

We the people of the U.S.A.

Want everyone to know

And we’re here to say

We won the revolution,

We wrote the constitution

For justice, peace, and the U.S.A.

July 4, 1776

When in the course of human events

it becomes necessary for one people

to dissolve the political bonds

which have connected them with another,

and to assume

among the powers of the earth,

the separate and equal station

to which the laws of nature

and of nature’s God

entitle them,

a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires

that they should declare the causes

which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths

to be self-evident,

that all men are created equal,

that they are endowed by their Creator

with inherent and unalienable rights,

that among these

are life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.