For the past month we've been doing an election theme during our project time. We started just learning about the President and what he/she does. We also talked about the qualities that make a good President. We went over (in first grade terms) the election process and about debates and campaigns. Since the Presidential election is going on right now it was easy to tie into current events.
We used The First Grade Parade's ideas for the next part of our unit. Check out her unit at http://thefirstgradeparade.blogspot.com/2012/02/they-like-me-they-really-do.html and on TeachersPayTeachers http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Pint-Sized-Presidential-Fun-Math-Literacy-Mini-Unit. We then wrote about "If we were President". We used The First Grade Parade's wall display for writings.
It turned out so cute!
We read three books, Duck for President, Grace for President, and My Teacher for President.
After, we voted on which one of the three characters from the books we would want to become President. One of my great parent volunteers made us a voting booth and another made us a voting box. Students came up with their voter registration cards and privately voted for who they wanted. We talked about how we don't tell others who we voted for. The next day we made a tally chart with the results. Duck won in our class! Next we took the results from our tally chart and made a bar graph and answered questions about it.
Tomorrow our school is doing a mock election for the Presidential race. Students will be voting on their ipads and the votes will be tallied for the whole school. Today I showed them pictures of the two candidates and reminded them to keep who they are voting for to themselves and to think about who they think will be best for our country, without going into any detail.
Next we will be having a class election and working with our fifth grade book buddies to make campaign trailers through iMovie. We will have a boys' and girls' primary and each group will nominate and vote for a representative. The winners will then have a debate and give a speech for why they think they should be class President. We will then do a final vote and reveal who is our class President.
I love our project time during the day. It is a time were we can work on so many standards while learning about something that means something to us. Students are so engaged in what we are doing and can't wait till the next day. More updates later!
Catch ya next week,
Nicole Berg
No comments:
Post a Comment