Theme Teaching - Election Activities

Election Activities

I am getting my students involved with the presidental and NY senate campaigns in the following ways:

http://youthvote.org/ allows students to vote unoficially on-line for both elections AND governor, if there's an election in your state.

USE THE LOCAL NEWSPAPER.........I have my students select one of the presidental candidates to monitor. After 2 long background discussions, we made a list of issues together: women's rights, taxes, keeping America out of wars, money for schools, treatment of immigrants.

These are the issues that my students think are important. WE put them into a chart form. Each student must fill-in their charts and "track" their canidate by monitoring what he says, as quoted in our local paper.

This is the first time this year that the kids are eager to dive into the news. Side discussions around what is government, economy, and taxes preceeded these discussions.

I also asked the kids what their candidate has to do to get the women's vote. To determine that, students must interview a woman of voting age in their family to find out what's important to them; this has brought rich discussion into our room!
Submitted by: Michael Kandel