Democracy in Action: Classroom Election Activities With a Kid-Friendly Approach
Looking for classroom election activities? It’s time to elect a new president and our students are hearing about the election everywhere they turn. We wanted to come up with a fun way to teach them about the presidential election using a kid-friendly approach.
Read on to find out about the classroom election activities we did with our students and grab some FREE Election vocabulary posters!
We went searching for picture books that would help us to engage our students and found these great books:
Then we decided to hold our own classroom mock election with the characters from the books as the candidates. We discussed important vocabulary such as nominate, election, and constituents and introduced a new character each day by reading one of the books.
You can grab the posters we used to introduce the vocabulary for FREE below:
The students completed a story map for each book and filled out a character sheet that allowed them to take a deeper look at each of the “candidates”.
After all four characters were introduced, it was time to choose two nominees. The class was split into two political parties and they came up with a name for their party. We assigned two delegates to each party. Then it was time for the national convention!
Students in each party were split into different sized groups to represent how states of different sizes contribute different amounts of votes. Each small group decided which of the candidates to give their votes to and each party in the end selected a nominee to represent their party. Our students chose Grace and Otto to be the presidential nominees!
Next up, it was time to prepare for the debate. The students pretended that they were the nominee for their party and filled out a paper that persuaded others why they should be the next president. They then has the opportunity to debate with a student from a different party.
We also had a few volunteers take questions from the audience and answer from Grace or Otto’s perspective.
Afterwards students “campaigned” for their candidates by creating posters, and finally it was time to vote! They filled in their ballots, the votes were counted…
and the winner was Grace!
We loved how engaged and excited our students were during this mock election. We hope that you give it a try and let us know how it goes in your classroom! You can find the full election unit with all of the activities below:
Looking for another fun and interactive educational experience for your students? Check out our nonfiction text feature surgery blog post below!
