Election Day!

Election Day at Engville!

After doing some major editing and spelling of their work, I thought it might be fun to somehow incorporate the election day in their writing. 

The in class assignments for the day were the following:
1. What makes a good candidate?
Some of their thoughts were the following: gives out ice cream on sundays, stops wars, lowers gas prices, makes people stop taking drugs, educated, nice, african american, a woman. 
2. What makes a bad candidate?
Their thoughts: a liar, a thief, a bully, someone who has been to jail multiple times, someone who isn't nice or can't read. 
3. Construct a poster of an Ad for your "good" candidate. I had the students draw pictures and then below write a Headline. Some headlines were:
Vote for me! No school for a year!
Mrs. Peanut for president!
4. Lastly, their lengthy in class writing assignment was to write a couple paragraphs starting with the sentence, "If I were president I would..."

This assignment turned out to be very fun. Ms. Smith was actually doing a mini election with them after we left so the writing assignments turned out to be very helpful. The students participated, indeed they were nearly standing on their chairs to shout out what made a good candidate for president. Every student I heard, and I believe I heard all of them, wanted Obama to win. This class gave me the idea to start tying in more writing assignments with world issues. Instead of arbitrarily thinking of something the kids could write about, why not pick a global issue. I was astounded that for one of the "If I were the president" paragraphs I read how a student would stop global warming. H-mmm, food for thought.