I Voted!

Today we voted for the President of the United States!

Each year, Scholastic hosts a Presidential election a month prior to Election Day. Students around the country, from Kindergarten through twelfth grades, can fill out a ballot. Teachers collect the ballots and submit them to Scholastic, where they count up the votes and declare a winner.

The interesting thing about the Scholastic election is that it has reflected the results of the actual election in every case except for two!

We briefly discussed voting today and then, one-by-one, we went out into the hall to cast our vote. Everyone took the vote VERY seriously and were excited to participate in the political process. After the vote, we all got “I Voted!” stickers, just like adults!

Did your class vote for the next President?

Leaders Foldable

So 100th Day sort of threw us off... and Chinese New Year... but we really are studying our government! Today we learned about our leaders. We talked about community leaders, state leaders, and country leaders.


They had no idea what a community leader was even called, so they didn't know their own mayor. Also they didn't know who our governor was! So we learned a lot. The funny thing was that, in our book, the governor example is Arnold Schwarzenegger and the president example is George Bush.


I asked if any of them recognized Arnold from anywhere and they just looked at me, puzzled. Five minutes later, one said, "Um, isn't that the guy from Kindergarten Cop?" Yes, my friend, yes it is.


Anyway!


We made a foldable type of thing to help us remember our leaders. I don't know if it really counts as a foldable per se since no folding actually occurred. Regardless, it was a type of graphic organizer and the kids loved it!

As you can probably see... we wrote the name of our community (which I have removed, just use your imagination) with the name of our mayor in the little circle, Illinois with the name of our governor in the middle circle, and United States with the name of our president in the outside circle! It also helped them understand that the president leads more people and has more power than the mayor and governor!


They took their bullseyes home today to teach their parents about our leaders! Although I found one on the floor after school..... boo.

Tomorrow we learn about elections! I'm excited to push a read-aloud into Social Studies - check back tomorrow! :)