Hi teacher friends welcome to a very late edition of
~ ~ it’s been a BUSY couple of weeks. Conferences, Halloween on a Monday { seriously }, and the elections are just around the corner. I’m so curious how you handle the election process or elections in general in your classroom. It’s even a bit trickier to handle when the elections are surrounded by so much drama controversy.
My team teacher has always taught about the election process – in fact she has had permission every election for the last 4 of them to bring her class into the election room ( which is done on our campus as we are a polling site ) and her students sit quietly and observe voters. Her adult daughter will be there voting and we will watch her throughout the process. After that the polling people for lack of a better name give all of our students I voted stickers. But first….they need to vote.
After teaching them about the process and a little about our government including the 2 main parties – but NOT their platforms. We keep this very UN political so we don’t upset parents. So we teach the animal that represents each party and general information about how the parties started etc. We also teach about the process of voting: registering to vote, providing an I.D., having the vote be ‘secret’, etc. Then after we have them ‘register’ the FRIDAY before voting they must have their I.D. that we provided with their picture to vote on the Tuesday. We set up several voting boots with privacy partitions and even a ballot box for them to turn their ballots into.
Later we count the votes and announce who won at our grade level. We teach them GENERAL information about the candidates like: where they went to college, when and where they were born etc. We make sure to not put our opinion into it and try not to get their opinions ( or really their parent’s opinions ) in it either. We definitely do NOT talk about their stances on issues as that is not appropriate and too deep for them at this age.
We keep it light and give parents a heads up that we will be doing this in a very light, informative manner.
I will post pics on my facebook page of the kids voting next week. If you want a little election pack to do something for next week you can grab it ( here ). It includes a poem and close reading, etc. if you don’t want to have a mock election but still want to tie the election into your lesson plans.
Don’t forget to go out and vote ~ and if you are someone of faith be praying for our country and our leaders. <3 Happy Hump Day! XO,
