Election Simulation

Election Day Cupcakes - decorated with halloween candy

Rob and I voted absentee again this year.  Evidently we are troublemakers because it's those absentee ballots that are holding up the Florida results.  I don't feel too bad though because look what we missed out on:

This is our normal polling place and the immense line you see is just the beginning of the line.  It wrapped around the back side of the building and into the parking lot.  The kids and I drove buy just to see what it was like and I highly recommend voting absentee!

At PEP, we are doing election lessons.  I have a sort of semi-curriculum to loosely base things on for this section.  It is one of those "Teacher Created Materials" supplemental lesson plans.  The book is a little too technical for 1st and 2nd grade, but I have used a lot of their suggestions.  The first week we learned about different kinds of elections - open vs. secret and how to graph results.  Very practical.  Last week we talked about polling, nominating, and campaigning.  We did a little of all three.  The idea is to have a class election for "Best Pet."  So we used these concepts to come up with 2 potential pets.  The nominees?  Dogs...and Dolphins.

Yes, dolphins.  Now if I was 7 years old I'd love to have a dolphin.  And when they listed criteria that defined a good pet, dolphin really fit the bill - interesting, helpful, does tricks.  No one was interested in my suggestion that a good pet is easy to care for.

So I gave each kid paper and they made a campaign poster for either Dogs or Dolphins.  Here are two posters I made as examples.

I was all "Get on the boat...you know bandwagon propagan....uh never mind.:

This one was to highlight the pets desirable qualities.

Here are some student examples:

Hope  Love  Dog

One of the better ones - she added the reasons to vote for Dolphins

And there are always independent voters....like my son.

We will have our election tomorrow and learn about political parties, representative government, and find out what these kids will do if they become president someday.