K-12 Government/Election Teaching Materials

Check out games and activities on the topic of your choice!

Watch this! It's truly terrifying! Share it w/friends and family. This is a must see. It puts all the facts together about the NSA "failure" to protect use from the 9/11 hijackers because of Bush leaders refusal to follow FISA laws. NSA Takeover Secret govt agency kept intel from FBI about 9/11 hijackers, for money & power to spy on all. The upshot is that these non-elected US govt agents were able to convince our Congress that they weren't to blame for keeping intel about 9/11 terrorists living in USA for over a year from FBI. Instead NSA chief convinced US Congress that the NSA could have prevented 9/11 if they had more money and power to spy on everyone in USA. Now they have it.

watch this; abuse of power

Help Barack Obama craft his inauguration speech... MadLibs style!

amazing story of her first years here in the United States, when Ayn Rand wrote in her notebooks and fashioned her first hero after a serial killer of the 1920's. Why was this information not available when I was wanting to learn more about her early life? Everyone who knew her and helped her rise to prominence didn't want to have this information leaking out to the general public.

Investigating the Role of Vice President for the 2008 Election; Overview of Lesson Plan: In this lesson, students investigate the role and duties of the vice president of the United States; they then write persuasive essays in favor of one of this year's running mates using supporting evidence from The New York Times. (link for companion lesson for Gr. 3-5 with suggested modifications-PDF)

Excellent lesson plan from the Learning Network/Teacher Connections on the New York Times site. Great resources, links and discussion questions.

Great compilation of lessons and resources for elections (all grade levels). The resources continue to grow and you can contribute your own lessons to this site.

Entire collection of lesson plans and teacher resources for elections, government, voting, constitution, electoral college, teen voting and civic engagement, etc. from HotChalk.com

Excellent lesson plan for gr. 9-12 where students take on role of political analyst. Designed for 2004 election but could easily be modified for 2008. Another great lesson plan from HotChalk.

comprehensive lesson plan for gr. 9-12 including assessment, discussion questions, etc. Overview Students take on the role of a political analyst, forecasting the electoral vote count for the 2004 presidential election. In order to make a prediction, students are introduced to campaign issues, the Electoral College, the role of swing states, and the importance of political participation. The lesson plan includes a fun, interactive classroom competition where students make electoral predictions and compare with the actual results following the November 2nd voting deadline.

K-8 educational technology reources covering the Presidential inauguration.

This looks like a great online project for the 2008 election for K-6 students. They vote for president and the data is available for them to use in many projects. Site includes resource links, indeas and books.

Info shared by Nancy Golubic, Project Coordinator, Boardman, Ohio. I've just posted my Election 2008 Online project. Four years ago, I ended up with almost 5,000 kids across the country voting. This year I hope to get more votes. Take a look. It says that registration opens on August 18th, but the registration link already works.

Looks like this starts August 18 recommended by Jen Wagner

An excellent article about ways technology is being used to learn about the election and participate in the conversation.

Both major parties' historic tickets-a black man for president, a woman for vice president-as well as compelling economic and foreign-policy issues are converging with the campaigns' use of text-messaging, online networking, and nontraditional media venues to draw young people into the contest. Teachers have also seized on the opportunity to use the favored devices of today's students in teaching traditional civics lessons along with the 21st-century skills experts say people will need to thrive in the information age. "The idea is to teach kids as young as possible to be able to navigate this increasingly complicated media world by giving them some basic tools for analysis

This should be a very informative debate. The video will be archived if you can't view it live. Looking forward to hearing an education focus for the Presidential election!

Join us for "Education and the Next President," a live debate from Teachers College, Columbia University, with Linda Darling-Hammond, education adviser to Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama, and Lisa Graham Keegan, education adviser to Presidential Republican nominee John McCain. The event is being exclusively Webcast by edweek.org with generous support from NASSP. A video archive of the event will be available Wed., Oct 22, at noon.

Another great lesson plan from the Dirksen Congressional Center's Congress in the Classroom workshop. Designed for students in grades 8-12.

During The Dirksen Congressional Center's annual Congress in the Classroom® workshop participants are asked to introduce the lesson plans, resources, and techniques that have proven successful in teaching about Congress in their classrooms.A 2008 participant, Jan Loyd, Cabot Junior High South, Cabot, AR, presented a lesson entitled, "Elect Me! Creating a Campaign Platform and Advertisement." Students will be a candidate for an election as a United States Representative or Senator in the upcoming election. They will need to decide which party fits their political views best. Next, they will plan and present a 3-5 minute campaign commercial about them as a candidate, their platform, and why the voters should vote for them.

excellent example of using Wordle to analyze inaugural poems.

Excellent blog post with lesson example for a powerful use of using Wordle in an English classroom. Students explore words from several different inaugural poems to predict the themes and symbols developed in the poems. World is a great tool for exploring the ways that writers use words.

Google U.S. Government Search offers a single location for searching across U.S. government information, and for keeping up to date on government news. You can choose to search for content located on either U.S. federal, state and local government websites or the entire Web -- from the same search box.

Google continues to add services--this is one stop shopping for searches related to U.S. Government. Could be really valuable for compiling data for student research. You can make it your homepage and personalize it by adding other content feeds to the page. You can have separate personalized content on both your Google U.S. Government Search and Google.com homepages.

Here's a nice compilation of many teaching resources for elections, propaganda, democracy, civics, government, voting, and presidential resources.

An excellent compilation of teaching resources, lessons and projects for K-12.

Nice basic lesson plan for K-2 students to help them understand the concept of voting on a ballot and having a reason for voting the way they did.

Lesson plan for K-2 students from HotChalk lesson plans page. Uses 3 little pics and asks kids to vote on which version of the story they believe. Helps kids understand what happens when you vote on a ballot.

Here is a list of website resources for Presidential Inauguration via GHartman on Twitter.