Teaching About Elections

One hands-on way to teach about the election process is to hold a mock election with your class or family. You can mirror the real candidates and watch news and media for their real platforms, or you can design your own election for very local office, such as family president for the day or class CEO. Try out a campaign and see if you can duplicate ballots for your electors to use. Tally the results and have the winner create an acceptance speech.

There's no reason that election activities have to only happen during social studies time! Cross those curricular barriers by learning age appropriate information about statistics and graphing as you study an election. You can take on simple graphic depiction of data for young learners, or talk about lying with statistics with middle elementary students. Try setting up valid polls and analyzing them with older students. The possibilities are endless! Change vote numbers into percentages and percentages into vote numbers. Calculate what is a simple majority, what is plurality and so forth. Once you open the math door, you'll find that there is literally no end of connections that you can make to the election process.