Growing Voters 2008

Classroom Activities - Brief Descriptions

• Candidate Debate with "Spin Room"
• Civic Lemonade Stand
• Kid Reporters in Action
• Create Online Newspaper for "First" in White House
• Create "Why Vote" pamphlet
• Students Blog the Issues
• Kid to Kid: Teach Younger Students
• Students design and conduct survey
• All politics is local: predict by county
• Make campaign ads
• Primary Students Use Primary Sources

Candidate Debate with "Spin Room"

The best way for students to see behind the curtain of media Oz is to create it themselves. Once students play the role of interpreting and analyzing the candidates and issues, as "spinners", they can immediately grasp it as opinion rather than fact.

Students will be put into teams:

• Democratic Party Prep Team to prepare and support Senator Barak Obama in the debate
• Republican Party Prep Team to prepare and support Senator John McCain in the debate.
• Media Consultants Republican Team to develop "spin" analysts for the post debate follow-up media room.
• Media Consultants Democrats Team to develop "spin" analysts for the post debate follow-up media room.
• Journalists Team to generate questions in advance and then conduct interviews with spin experts following the debate in the media room.
• Video Crew Team (optional) to use webcams or video camera to film debate plus spin interviews.
• Suggested extension assignment: use the same raw film footage and student crews or journalists in print edit two different "stories" or debate coverage each showing different conclusions (or spin) with the same material.

Full activity and instructions: candidate_debate_with_spin_room.pdf

Instructions for first-time downloaders.

High School grades

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Voter Information / Civic Lemonade Stand

Students in a class (Middle School or High School and organized as age- appropriate) have the assignment to produce a WHY VOTE pamphlet of their own. Websites with various resources are provided in our activity. See the Growing Voters list.

The students come to some decisions about what the content should be. That right there is pretty important: their own answers to why someone eligible to vote should do so. For the pamphlet, some students will be interested in writing the content, some about layout, others about art work, and still others about production itself: the students take ownership of the Why Vote pamphlet.

This Civic Lemonade activity deepens the impact. This part of the activity is for students in groups to take their Why Vote? pamphlet out into the public; to a school event, to a mall, out on the sidewalk in front of their school, to a sporting event, etc.

In lemonade stand fashion, students distribute not a given pamphlet from an organization (like the League of Women Voters' materials), but their very own creation. With that they get engaged in the civic process. When they ask a passing adult "excuse me, are you going to vote on November 4th?"; or "May I give you the voting pamphlet that my class made?" and they have a dialogue with the person who stops, right then, it happens: they are participating in the political process.

Full activity and instructions: Civic_Lemonade_Stand.pdf

Instructions for first-time downloaders.

Middle School grades / High School grades

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Kid Reporters in Action

This activity is intended for younger students, Grades 1-3, although it could be adapted for upper level students. The focus of this lesson is on learning about how voters make their choices in the Presidential Election. In this activity the students become interviewers and go out to the community (parents, grandparents, teachers, principal, soccer coach, etc.) to discover the most important election issues and whom these adults are planning to vote for and why.

Elementary students will learn the basic steps of choosing a president: how people decide whom to vote for, and what issues are most important in their communities. By reporting on the election themselves, students will also get to understand the process of how the campaign is reported in the news media and in polls.

Full activity and instructions: kid_reporters_in_action.pdf

Instructions for first-time downloaders.

Elementary School grades

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Create Online Newspaper for "First" in White House

History in the Making: The First in the White House

On November 4, 2008 Americans voters will elect either the first African- American into the White House as President or the first woman ever as Vice- President.

In this activity students create materials to explore the significance of these turning points in current American history.

Activity

Students will do internet research and in-person interviews on the subject of the first African-American or woman in office in the White House. Working in groups they will create a (Microsoft Word) newspaper to explore what they expect will happen when one of these two historic events takes place.

Through brainstorming the class can make decisions about what articles are needed and make the story assignments that go with them. The class can be divided into groups of reporters and writers/ editors / artists / publishers. (All can serve as distributors of the finished paper.)

Students can illustrate the newspaper with their own original artwork. Pictures can be digitally scanned and uploaded to the document or produced on paper and added to the printed newspaper.

Check with the school to see if the newspaper can go on the school's website. Students can also use an online blog to publish their work. An additional activity is to use voicethreads.com to have students record their news articles so that lower grade readers and English language learners can have access to their newspaper.

Elementary School grades

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Create "Why Vote" pamphlet

Overview

In this activity, students will create and use their own materials to learn about the voting process, explore the reasons that people should vote, and take part in a community drive to promote voting. Students will learn through direct hands-on experience why voting is important and become aware of why some citizens decide not to vote. Once students are distributing their pamphlets and speaking to voters in their community, students are participating in the actual political process even before reaching voting age.

This activity can be expanded or reduced to make it appropriate for a range of grades.

Full activity and instructions: Why_Vote_Pamphlet.pdf

Instructions for first-time downloaders.

Middle School grades / High School grades

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Students Blog the Issues

Overview

More and more media organizations include blogs on the election so why not have our students do likewise with their own versions? It is a powerful learning format when students grapple with their own analysis of electoral issues and are in a position to make their views known to others. Online resources are valuable tools for collaboration and sharing across classes, schools, and communities. There are available Blog sites which are free, safe and easy to use. Furthermore, high school students may already be familiar with these tools!

Activity

1. The students will work in pairs to research and list issues that are being debated by the candidates in the presidential election. The Growing Voters Web Resources lists a number of good sites to support this research.
2. Student pairs should identify the issues that they feel are the most important.
3. The class can then brainstorm and divide up the issues among groups interested in taking responsibility for each selected issue cluster (or sub- divide them as necessary). The students will include the candidates' stance on each of the selected issues.
4. Volunteers can form to work with the teacher to set up the blog space itself (and in consultation with the rest of the class, time and interest permitting).
5. The student issue groups plan their blog entries. If desired, the teacher can have each group briefly present their main ideas to the class.
6. Each issue group goes online and posts their blog entries based on their research, analysis and opinion on the key election issues.
7. The class distributes the blog web address (url) to another class, to friends, to another school, etc. as decided by individual class circumstances and preferences. Teachers can also arrange for this process in advance.
8. Students check the blog for posted commentaries and students respond to posts on their blog.
9. Class discussion on the interaction and commentaries from others: what surprised them about the process? What kinds of reactions did they get? What questions did they get and/or ask of other bloggers?

These issue analyses can be blogged; this can be made into a wiki and traced through after the election; and these analyses can also be made into Podcasts. Various online tools sites provided from Growing Voters website.

An alternative approach is to continue the blog as election coverage throughout the campaign with the polls, forecasts, predictions and then compare with what actually occurred when the results in November become available. Students can ask what aligned with expectations or did not and WHY? Blogs can also be used to trace the transition to a new administration.

High School grades

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Kid to Kid: Older grade presentations for younger grades

Overview

A very effective way to learn material is to teach it to others. In this activity, students actively engage with content as they build their own teaching materials and present to a class in a lower grade. Instead of hearing passively about the significance of political parties in this country, here the students are asked to answer that question for themselves in preparation for explaining it to younger students. Older students will need to find out party platforms and candidate stances on issues so they can be informed presenters outside their classrooms.

Full activity and instructions: kid_to_kid_presentations_middle_school.pdf

Instructions for first-time downloaders.

Middle School grades

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Students Conduct Own Survey

Overview

Students Design, Create and Analyze results of their own poll

The Presidential campaign is full of constant reports about public opinion towards the candidates and attitudes on the issues. These are mostly based on results of national polls conducted by a variety of sources for various purposes. In this activity students will get behind the national statistics and see how data on public opinion is generated. By designing their own poll, students will see the importance of what questions are asked and how they are asked, what data is collected and how it is analyzed. As students analyze and present their own data, they understand the wider role of public opinion in the Presidential election process.

Activity

Divide the class into teams or groups for design, creation, distribution, and analysis.

Full activity and instructions: Students_Conduct_Own_Poll.pdf

Instructions for first-time downloaders.

Middle School grades / High School grades

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Know Your Counties: Recognize Patterns and Predict the Vote

ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL

Overview

There is a famous saying in politics which is that "all politics is local". In this activity students have the chance to look very closely at the local vote for President. The free online data available shows election results over time and broken down into counties, which makes it possible for students to quickly investigate their own state in detail. These numbers also give students a solid basis of prediction for the Fall vote.

Full activity and instructions: All_politics_is_local.pdf

Instructions for first-time downloaders.

Middle School grades

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Produce Campaign Ads

Students working in groups design and produce campaign commercials for each candidate. Videos can be viewed on a number of safe and reliable websites, like the independent Real Clear Politics. See the Growing Voters list for references. Students can download clips which can be used to construct new commercials.

Students can also video their own original production and edit it together into their own campaign commercial. Using even a digital camera with short "video capture" or loading short clips from the internet, free online software at eyespot.com allows students to easily storyboard and edit together a short video with text.

At Eyespot.com, (login username "Growing Voters"), videos can be stored online where they are easy to view, show, and share.

For extension activities, link to a discussion about demographic questions and electoral college and/or "battleground states".

High School grades

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Primary Students Use Primary Sources

Students use online primary resources to research and write a short paragraph about one of the past Presidential elections. The Library of Congress has a variety of great resources including speeches, music, photos, and letters. Have students work in pairs or groups and get a chance to click through sources that show actual documents and artifacts from past Presidents.

Particular websites are suggested on the Growing Voters link. Students can download photos, music, and cut and paste from letters and memoirs. Their paragraph should draw upon what they found from primary sources.

Students can also illustrate their paragraphs with their own artwork.

Optional extension: have students digitally scan in their paragraphs (or write them using Word or PointPoint) so that the whole class' work can be easily assembled and shown to others.

Elementary School grades

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