The Life of a Running Momma: Weekly Learning Theme: Voting and Presidents

Ty had the day off work on election day so he could go and vote. I wanted to take Carter and Elise with us so they could experience voting and to instill in them the importance of voting. I started explaining to Carter a little bit about voting so he would understand a little bit more what was going on when we arrived. After we got home I decided to stretch the voting experience into a learning theme, adding in learning about presidents as well.

Listed below are the objectives I am focusing on for the themed weeks. I have revised our objectives to really hone in and focus on specific skills Carter will need to master before kindergarten and are appropriate to his age and development right now. I plan to continue to implement activities to practice and reinforce our previous objectives while putting more emphasis on our new objectives. Some of them won't necessarily be targeted with specific activities during our weeks, but I wanted to list them to help me remember to practice them continually. I have added working on his name as his teachers at school have asked us to work on it at home and I want to remember to include working on it in some form during each of our learning themes. I'm also adding in a section for Elise now that she is a year old. I don't considers her bullet points objectives, they are experiences I want to make sure to expose her to frequently. Her experiences are listed below Carter as bullet points rather than numbers.

The highlighted objectives below are ones Carter received exposure to during our theme this week:

Begin to organize and focus on writing. (Dictate stories, plan out a story, draw pictures and scribbles to create a book).
Understand same and different.
Accurately tell stories as well as retell the story from a book.

Use age appropriate scissors. (I'm moving on to looking for a thumb and forefinger grasp with writing tools and holding scissors appropriately)
Develop a better understanding of time (for example, be able to describe when things happen using morning, afternoon, night)

Group objects based on a category (sort by defining feature).

Count with one-to-one correspondence, begin to identify numerals, being to use ordinal numbers (first, second, last).
Recognize the letters in name, arrange them to spell name, begin to write name.

Experiences Elise was exposed to during our theme this week are highlighted below:

Pretend play/Imitate the behaviors of others.
Begin to identify and point at body parts. (Right now I just want to say body parts aloud to her frequently and point them out on myself)
Group based on simple characteristics. (This is something I will do while talking aloud and allowing her to feel objects)
Fill and empty containers.
Begin to hold writing tools and scribble spontaneously.
Identify sounds around her. (Point out sounds and ask her what is making the sound).

Activities/Movement:

I wrote the words voting and presidents on separate sentence strips. We talked about the words and discussed the letters Carter recognized in each word.
We decided to hold our own election to decide on a pet of the year. We talked about who our pets are and how we were going to vote one of them to be our pet of the year. I had Carter think about each candidate and make a list of reasons why we should vote for each of them, that way daddy could vote when he got home.

Working on our list.

Carter's finished lists for the candidates.
I had 3 different sizes of stars: big, medium, and small. I showed them to Elise and discussed their size with her. Then Carter and I helped her put them in order from small to large. We also talked about what color each of the stars was. Carter and I discussed the colors and made the connection to the colors on the American flag. When we were finished with the stars Elise ripped them all up in typical Elise fashion.
I used a star cookie cutter to make stars out of construction paper. I then wrote the letters in Carter's name on the stars. I showed him the stars and then gave him a piece of paper with his name written out on it. It was his job to find the letters on the stars and use them to put the stars in order to spell his name. When he was finished we talked about the AB color pattern we had made with the stars in order to spell his name.
I had stars with the different letters of the alphabet from a free printable I found here. First I put a star down one at a time and asked Carter to identify it's name and sound if he knew it. Then we put the letters in order and sang the ABC song. We also discussed his letters of the month at school and I had him point them out within the alphabet once we had finished singing. Carter loves talking about letters and tends to add in his own ideas for letter related activities. This time it was coming up with a word that starts with the letter I was pointing out. He loves doing that!

Identifying the letter names of letters on stars.
Also from this awesome packet of free printables, I had an American flag with no stars in the blue area. We used the flag to play a rolling the die game. I wanted to work a bit more on identifying numerals rather than counting dots so I used sticky paper to cover the dots on our die and instead wrote the numeral that represented that number of dots. Carter identified the numeral and then counted out the appropriate number of stickers to add onto his flag. I put the flag inside a sheet protector so we could peel the stickers off when we were finished and reuse the page. Carter loved the activity and continued playing while I made our lunch and also watched him. He needed a few reminders of what number 5 and 6 were but was able to identify 1-4 all on his own.
Carter really enjoyed learning about presidents and what their job is in our country. I told him the president when he was born was Barack Obama. He loved repeating that name and even named one of his cars Barack Obama which I thought was cute. So he could learn a bit more about the current president who was also president when he was born, I pulled out a Scholastic News book about Obama when he was first elected president and we read about him.
We looked at a Scholastic News poster of presidents and I had Carter discuss how the presidents were alike and how they were different. He first noticed they were all wearing dark colors in their pictures. So he then pointed out that some were wearing black, some gray, and some brown. Then he noticed some pictures were photographs while other were drawings. We discussed why that was and how some presidents lived before cameras were invented. It took him a while to realize that all the presidents were men. He was a little sad when we talked about how Hillary Clinton would have been the first female president if she had been elected. He said there should be more girl presidents. He never noticed that Obama's skin was a different color than the other presidents so I brought that up and we discussed it. Then we went through and counted how many presidents we have had.
We played Play Doh and used the star cookie cutters to make red and blue stars. We also rolled out and smashed Play Doh to practice making stripes like on the flag.

I put together a sensory bin very similar to our 4th of July sensory bin. It was filled with red rice and I put an assortment of blue, white, and red foam stars in it along with star cookie cutters, a flag, and some red, silver, and blue beaded necklaces. When Jake was over at our house he saw the flag and started chanting U.S.A. It was hilarious! Elise liked the necklaces the most and Carter enjoyed playing with the flag.
Before we had our vote for pet of the year we went on a walk/bike ride to find election signs. When we found one we would discuss what it looked like. Carter pointed out that they all just had words and no pictures. He wanted me to read each sign and we talked about what we would put on our campaign signs for Harper and Skippy. Carter did a great job riding his bike and didn't want to go home. He rode for over a mile and was disappointed when I told him it was time to turn back. He wanted to keep looking for more signs.

Carter looking at a sign that had fallen down.
We held our own election, voting for pet of year. I pulled out a couple of file folders to use as a way to give each other privacy. We had a box to put our votes in rather than the special vote counting machine used at the actual polling place. As we voted we talked about how voting in our election was similar to real voting and how it was different. Carter, Elise, Ty, and I all voted. Elise was so cute pointing at Harper's picture on her ballot and choosing Harper. I showed her to color in the box next to Harper since that's who she wanted to vote for and she did. Then she scribbled all over Skippy's box too so I asked her if she wanted to vote for Skippy and she said no, Harper.

Carter casting his ballot.

Elise working really hard on her ballot.
After the presidential election I let Carter watch Trump's victory speech and Clinton's concession speech. We discussed how they were both good sports. Trump didn't say "I won, I won," and put Clinton down. He didn't gloat and he wasn't mean. He said Clinton had done a good job and worked hard. In Clinton's speech she didn't complain or say things were unfair, she congratulated Trump. We used it as a way to discuss good sportsmanship and I was impressed that they were actually both good role models of that. I watched both speeches before I showed them to Carter because I wasn't sure Trump's would be appropriate for Carter to watch.

Once we had all voted we pulled the ballots out of the box and used them to make a graph. We used the graph to interpret the results. Carter looked at the bars on the graph and knew without counting that they had the same number of votes. I asked him how many votes each pet got and he said 2. So we then went to Facebook where earlier in the day I had posted Carter's arguments for why each pet should win just for fun. Some people voted in the comments on who they felt was the winner so we counted them up and used that as our tie-breaker. Harper won Facebook votes 6-1 which are the tally marks on the graph, so Harper became our pet of the year. Carter and I got Harper over and told her she won. Then we talked again about how Trump had been a good sport in his speech and we wrote Harper's speech for her. I then read it and pretended Harper was saying it. Then we wrote a concession speech for Skippy after reviewing what Clinton had said in her speech that made her a good sport.

Carter using our ballots to create a graph.

Our finished graph showing the votes for each candidate.

Craft:

After we went on a walk to look at campaign posters, we created our own signs for our election. Carter decided the most important thing to put on the signs was their names as that had been what was on all the campaign signs we had seen. He asked for help in doing that so I wrote the pets' names on the posters. Then he colored in the block letters I made and wrote their names on a couple other signs.

Carter working hard to write Skippy's name. He spilled water on his shirt while we were working so he just took it off.

Elise adding to the sign.

Our house with the campaign signs up, in hopes of swaying daddy's vote.

Carter wanted to add more after we hung it.
We had some American flag stickers so we used them to decorate pictures. Elise colored on her picture and Carter decided he wanted to add the stickers to his star name page we had made.
I also pulled out some other star stickers for Carter's American flag game. When he was done with the game he peeled the stickers off the page protector and put them on a piece of paper. Elise colored on the page to make a picture out of the stickers.

Special Snack:

Carter absolutely loved the American flag toast we made during our July 4th learning theme so we made it again during this theme. Elise likes to eat the blueberries off, then suck off the jelly, then eat the toast spread with cream cheese.

Make Believe:

We pretended to have our own election. Carter loved being a "campaign manager" by making signs and listing reasons why we should vote for each candidate.

Songs:

We listened to a Youtube mix of patriotic songs for kids. We started with Yankee Doodle and it went through lots of other favorites.

Technology:

I tried to find an app or a game that would let you vote and then have you count and record vote totals or something and found nothing of the sort. Instead we talked about how the president is the head of our country that is made up of lots of different states. Then Carter played a game where he clicked on different states on the map and it read him the state's name, game here. There were a few pretty cool puzzles but they would have been too hard so we just did this one. Carter enjoyed getting to hear each state's name.

Field Trip/Interactive Experience:

On election day we got to go as a family because Ty's work gave everyone the day off so they could get out and vote. We explained things to Carter as we waited in line and then I let him feed my ballot into the counting machine. The ladies working were nice enough to give us extra stickers so Carter and Elise could each have one. It was an awesome experience. I wore Elise and Ty took Carter so I'm not sure how much Carter actually looked at the ballot, but he was intrigued by the whole thing and understood it was important enough that he was super quiet and well behaved the entire time.

Carter had a good day at school so he picked watching some "TV" as a reward. We let him watch some as we stood in line waiting to vote.

Showing off our "I Voted" stickers.