• Election day is a vital part of the U.S. system of government. It is on this day that many citizens of our country head to the polls (or mail boxes) to cast their votes. Election day can be a valuable day of learning for students. By integrating election-themed activities into classes, teachers can hope to engage students in learning about the democratic process and impress upon them the importance of becoming educated about the issues and learning about the candidates.
  
  

Read All About It

• Learn about election day by reading fiction and nonfiction books with an election day theme. Gather a library full of election day reading material. Some popular books with a dominant voting theme include: "Woodrow for President: A Tale of Voting, Campaigns, and Elections" by Peter W. Barnes; "Presidential Elections and Other Cool Facts" by Syl Sobel; and "America Votes: How Our President Is Elected" by Linda Granfield and Steve Bjorkman. You can invest in a set of election books that you can use year after year, or you can seek free resources from your area library. If you contact your library in advance of election day, they likely will be able to collect a set of election-themed books that you can borrow and read with your students on election day.
  
  

Create Campaign Posters

• In the months and weeks leading up to an election, your students will be inundated by campaign ads on TV, radio and the Internet. Use election day as an opportunity to explore advertising techniques and learn about the concept of propaganda by exploring campaign posters. Look at posters from the current election as well as campaign posters from the past. Many campaign posters are archived online and can be pulled up for easy display on a classroom LCD projector or printed out and hung around the classroom. Explore the colors, images and themes present in each poster and discuss ways in which the posters are effective in getting people to support a particular candidate. Then ask students to use their knowledge of campaign posters to create their own poster. Using a digital camera, you can photograph and print out images of the students that they can use on their posters, or you can ask them to put their artistic skills to the test and draw their own images. After the posters are finished, hang them around the room for all to admire.
  
  

Have a Mock Election

• The most popular election day activity is the mock election. Have an election in your school by allowing students to vote during lunch or in history class. You can make the election as elaborate as you desire. You can require students who wish to vote to register in advance as we do in our society or you can make voting required by all students. To discover grade and gender trends, you can mark each voting slip prior to the election. Assign a different color to each grade so you can easily sort the slips and determine how the votes fell in each grade after you have tallied the overall votes. You can also mark the slips with M's and F's to see how boys and girls voted. Compile the statistics and present them to students, asking their opinions on why the votes fell as they did. After the real election results are in, compare your school election results to the results of the real vote. Work with students to hypothesize reasons why differences may exist between the two results.