Voting

Last week, we went to Kid Vention where our students learned about democracy and voting.  

We had our students write debates and share their thoughts in front of the grade level.

We made them ballots:

And classy voting boxes:

They get to vote on the four issues until tomorrow afternoon.  We're going to analyze the data next week and see whose class had the most voters :)

11/01 Update:

Here's our finalized vote:

Not a lot of votes :(
Exactly how we expected.  Should lead to an interesting conversation on Monday about being passionate about issues and actually taking the time out to vote.

Students couldn't vote during learning time.  They had to come before school, stay after or come in at lunch.  We chose to do this because very few adults get time off to vote, we have to take the time out of our day to perform this civic duty.

Kid vention

Today we went on our field trip to Kid Vention in Henderson:

On the way there, I read aloud The Lightning Thief on the bus.  Our sweet old bus driver was a little bit confused when I asked for the microphone to host a read-aloud, but he willingly obliged.  To be fair, I wasn't going to take no for an answer, so his compliance was appreciated :)

As a side note, the read aloud did not go as well as I expected.  I sat on my knees, facing the back of the bus and between the construction zones and swerving, got a little car (bus?) sick from reading.  Plus, some stinkers in the back were being disrespectful.

At least we tried to cram in more reading :)

We got to the ampitheater:

We saw four debates today:

And my students got really, really into it:

Hurray for democracy and voting!