Grateful November 8: Early Voting

It's here.  

It's Election Day.

Teachers in my district have the day off of school for voting, which is pretty nifty.  Not to worry, we have an additional sixty four minutes tacked on to each full week of school throughout the year to make up for this "free" day off.

However, I am not headed to the polls today.

That's not to say I'm not doing my civic duty and voting, but rather I took full advantage of early voting...and it was glorious.

B and I early voted last weekend and then got pretzels at the mall, because that's what adults do.

Instead, today is spent tackling a variety of tasks, including:

1) Finalizing picture details with the photographer
2) Supervising the instillation of a water softener 
3) Cleaning 
4) Make Up Trial (last one!)
5) Discussing the couch re-upholstery project with the handy man
6) Grading
7) Making thank you bags for the Veterans that are coming in this week
8) Laundry
9) Crafting
10) Finalizing and assembling the seating chart for the wedding

Good thing the pup got me up at 3 am today so I could get started on my task list!

Grateful November 3: Field Trips

We successfully survived our first field trip of the year!

Five classes, twenty chaperones, and 180(ish) excited fifth graders headed to the Henderson Pavillion last week to experience KidsVention.

Prior to the field trip, my students learned about debates, what "pro" and "con" mean, and practiced four debate topics during breakfast.

Careful to steer clear of the current political climate (because it's gotten a bit nasty), the topics were focused on kid-friendly ideas:

1) The United States should end its use of the penny.

2) Students should be required to learn a second language for high school graduation.

3) There should be screen limits for students on school nights.

4) All students participating in sports should earn a trophy.

In class, we talked about how each topic has both pros and cons (because otherwise it'd be a super boring debate).

The kids got clappers at the event, which were promptly confiscated when we got on the bus.  Not to worry, they got them back at the end of the school day.

The event was amazingly well organized, high school students debated with government officials about the four topics, and the whole theme of the event was on the importance of civic responsibility and voting.  

Many of my parent chaperones thanked me for inviting them along.  One described it as a wonderfully safe environment to talk about government because it's been hard to watch the Presidential debates with her children.

After the field trip, our day was devoted to making thank you cards for the chaperones, an empathy lesson from the counselor, and silent reading.

Hooray for field trip days!  

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!