Alright, so as I am hoping all of you know, tomorrow is election day. I am so fricking overwhelmed by this whole thing to tell you the truth. I know who I'm voting for, have my sample ballot all filled out and ready to go tomorrow, and am so anxious to watch the news tomorrow as the ballots come in. Traditionally, my state is red. Like, red, red, scarlet red. But all of the talk that I'm hearing is Obama, Obama, Obama. So it will be really interesting to see what happens.
In the interest of trying to get my students involved in politics early, we had a vote today. They have been talking on and off about the presidential candidates for weeks now. Did you know that the election is being discussed on channels such as Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon? Yeah. Craziness.
Anyways, we had a long discussion on what it means to be an "informed voter." That means not just voting for who your parents are saying you should or because you think the person is pretty or has the right color skin. We talked about what we know about the candidates (one of my girls knew a whole heck of a lot!) and what we wanted to know. Lots of the questions were things like "how old is he?", "is he married?", and "does he have kids?" These questions were answered my a wonderful Scholastic News article I had. Hooray!
After those all important questions were answered, we hopped over to the computer and checked out this site. We looked at each of the candidates bios and stats and then chose two issues that we wanted to know more about. The kids chose "war in Iraq" and "education." (I swear to you, I had absolutely NO say in what they picked.) We compared and contrasted where each candidate stood and talkde about what we thought about that. (Truly, I tried so hard not to be biased. There were a few things that I had to make into more kids friendly terms and it was really difficult for me to stick to what the words said. But I think I managed it pretty well.)
Then, we held our "election." I talked about how you're allowed to vote for whoever you want. It doesn't matter if everyone else around you is voting for someone else, you can vote what you believe is right. I also gave them the option of choosing "none of the above" because I want them to know that that's a valid option. End results ::drum roll please::..........................
Obama: 81% (13/16 votes)
McCain: 19% (3/16 votes)
Tada! And I think my kids are REALLY into seeing what happens tomorrow now. I guess we all just have to wait and see. ::shivers in antici........pation:: :)
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That's awesome that your kids are so interested. We're going to have our nephew over here with us tomorrow night (we invited my in-laws and he's staying with them right now) and I was curious as to what he knew. He's the same age as your kids as school, so I'll have to hit him up and see what his school did.
from your class' votes to God's ears... :)
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