Elect a President

It’s time to elect a new president and our students are hearing about the election every where they turn. We wanted to come up with a fun way to teach them about the presidential election using a kid-friendly approach. Read on to find out about the activity we did with our students.

We went searching for picture books that would help us to engage our students and found these great books: 

Then we decided to hold our own classroom election with the characters from the books as the candidates. We discussed important vocabulary such as nominate, election, and constituents and introduced a new character each day by reading one of the books. The students completed a story map for each book and filled out a character sheet that allowed them to take a deeper look at each of the “candidates”.

After all four characters were introduced, it was time to choose two nominees. The class was split into two political parties and they came up with a name for their party. We assigned two delegates to each party. Then it was time for the national convention! Students in each party were split into different sized groups to represent how states of different sizes contribute different amounts of votes. Each small group decided which of the candidates to give their votes to and each party in the end selected a nominee to represent their party. Our students chose Grace and Otto to be the presidential nominees!

Next up our students will prepare for the debate and create campaign posters before the big vote. Stay tuned for the next post with the results from our class election!

Until then check out all of these activities and more in our Elect a President Unit by clicking on the picture below:

If you have any awesome election activities you do in your classroom, we’d love to hear about them! Thanks for stopping by!