NOTES TO THE TEACHER

 

If you are going to do this lesson with your students, it is important that you do some pre-teaching about the American election system. If you throw this directly at your students without much preparation, it will fail miserably! (This I know from personal experience!) Since 2000 is an election year, there is a great deal of media attention on this topic. I tie this lesson in with my unit on the structure of the Federal Government.
 

I also recommend that you gather some political materials from local campaigns to use as resources for your students in addition to materials from the current presidential candidates. This will give the students a more realistic picture of who is running for public office and what they stand for. Party platforms, biographies, issue papers, and campaign paraphernalia are helpful. If you tell the campaign volunteers at the candidate's headquarters that you are an educator and you are teaching about elections and the electoral process, I have found that they are more willing to give you a wide variety of materials.

In order for this activity to have some true extension to real life, you must hold an election! Have your students take a day to present their candidates and their supporting information to the class (or to the school) and allow them to campaign. Hold primaries or a caucus to narrow your candidates to one from each major party. Allow the students to present their speeches, via videotape, to the class and hold a general election. If you have even more time, arrange for the students to hold a debate on specific topics from their platforms.
 

If your students can make connections between a real election and their fictitious one, they are more likely to approach the project seriously.
 

If your school does not have access to PowerPoint or HyperStudio, you can still do this project! I have done this without the multimedia presentations for 2 years and my students have produced typewritten copies of the biography, platform and speech. The posters and buttons were either created in a word processing program or with construction paper. The commercials are a new aspect for me, but I'm hoping for good results!
 

Good luck to you! I'd love to hear how your project went. Please email me with your comments and suggestions.