Aware of the Issues

The boys are already aware of the issues at hand, but it doesn’t hurt to have a brief reminder of where the candidates stand. We should make it a point to be informed as we go into the voting booth! I’d like my high school age son to fill out this chart, noting where the candidates stand on important issues.  Afterward, we will talk about where we stand on the issues.  I think it is important to talk with our children about which issues are important in this election, and how we, as Christians, know which issues are of primary importance.  Are all issues equally relevant?

Voting

How do we determine what we will base our vote on?  I’ve found this article on Principles for Voting by R.C. Sproul to be helpful to me, personally, as I seek to inform my children about Christian voting.  After this review, the boys will cast their votes in a mock election.

Learning How Elections Work

Election day will be a good opportunity to learn how elections work. I’m planning to do The Voice of the People: American Democracy in Action as a read-aloud with the younger children, focusing on the details of how a presidential election works.

Understanding the Electoral Process

The electoral process can be hard to understand, so after we read together I plan to do some hands on activities to help clear up how it all works.  We will look at a map of the 2008 election results and use a map of how many electoral votes each state has.  These maps are numbered the same, but I hope the kids will make that connection themselves.  Next, I’ll have them add up the electoral votes from each state and determine the total number of electoral votes each candidate received in that election. My middle schooler will take it one step further by experimenting with an Electoral College Calculator to try and predict the outcome of the next election.  He’ll need to have an idea of which states are blue and red, as well as the swing states, if he wants to make an accurate prediction.

I’ll also have them color a copy of the electoral votes map for the 2008 election. On election night, we can use another copy of the map to color in the state by state results as they are reported, recording on a white board the totals as they come in (at least as long as we are able to stay awake!).

The next day we can look at both colored maps to see which states remained blue or red from one Presidential election to the next and which states changed.  Some children may find this red and blue coloring activity easier to accomplish with a map with state names, preferring to write in the electoral college numbers themselves.

There are election resources all over the web!  Here is a page to get you started, with a host of links and activities for a variety of ages.  And here’s one more, with plenty of links about the election process.

I also gave him a list (to jog his memory) of some of the fallacies we have been studying this year in The Fallacy Detective. He has learned a lot this year about Red Herrings, Faulty Appeal to Authority, Appeal to the People (Bandwagon), Ad Hominem (personal attacks), and False Dilemmas. I printed out a handout which summarizes some of these fallacies, and we intend to talk about it this afternoon. It was harder than we thought it would be to spot these things at the time, but going back over some hastily jotted notes has been helpful.

We were able to easily spot some Red Herrings (changing the subject), some personal attacks (against the presidential candidates, typically), Appeal to authority (when talking about the War in Afghanistan), Appeal to Force (again, on the War in Iraq and on the economic issues), and many hasty generalizations.

The friend who directed me to all of these sites holds a Debate Party during every presidential campaign. They print out finger puppets of the candidates to use during the debates. She also directed me to a site with bingo boards, where children can compete to find commonly used words and phrases, such as “Main Street”, “Maverick” and “Terrorist”. We didn’t use the cards last night, as we had enough to keep track of with the score card and fallacy detecting, but I am filing that away for future reference! I haven’t used the other resource ideas she sent me, but they look great. There was a Teacher’s Guide filled with classroom ideas and applications as well as a link to Student News Daily, an online news source for high school students.

My favorite part of the debate was discussing issues with our very young elementary school aged son. He is so thoughtful, and keeps us always on our toes! He repeatedly asked questions like “What do you think about taxes, mom?” and “How do you feel about abortion? I think it is evil. How do these candidates feel about abortion? Why would anyone kill a baby, anyway?”

He wanted to know what they meant when referring to our current financial crisis. When I explained it to him he said, “That’s a bummer. When we learned about the Great Depression last year I thought to myself, ‘Wow. I’m glad I wasn’t alive back then!'” I told him that hopefully crisis will be averted. He astutely said that our country’s financial future would probably be uncertain until after the election on November 4th.