Guest Post: Election PBL in Action

Today's guest post is written by Second Grade teacher, Bethany Brumels.  In the weeks leading up to the 2012 Presidential Election, Bethany and other members of the 2nd Grade Team had been studying the government. Bethany has share her teaching and student learning experience below and how they used PBL as their approach to teaching as well as how they integrated different technology resources.

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PBL is a lot of fun for me.  I see my students engaged in a way that they never are otherwise, even with the best preparation.  Students who normally struggle to stay focused and complete a task get to shine and students who are fast at finishing and catching on to ideas have to stretch themselves.  After finishing our unit on government, which was a PBL unit with our second graders, every student had something to say.  I asked them about what they knew about elections and every hand in the room went up.  It was a great discussion.

With the upcoming election I wanted to try and have my students run an election.  As a second grade team we plan together a lot.  I brought up the idea with Char and Maggie, two other second grade teachers and we decided to run with it.  We started the unit by reading several books to our students about presidents and elections.  Our students loved them and before we even told them about having an ECC election they were talking and excited.

One tool we used a lot in this unit was YouTube.  We watched videos of the two presidential candidates and used that to decide what they believed on an issue.  We also watched a couple schoolhouse rock clips on our government and how it formed. After a clip we would sit down and talk about it, what did we learn?  Why does it matter? 

From the books our students remembered and pointed out campaign posters.  So we made posters.  In my class we made a t-chart comparing Mitt Romney and Barack Obama and talked about what each person believed on each issue.  Then half of my students agreed to create campaign posters for Mitt Romney and half worked on Obama posters.  My students were die-hard fans of President Obama; I was so proud of the fact that they recognized the need for Governor Romney to also have posters. 

The results were really amazing.  Students from all the classes had something to show and were proud of the fact.  On Election Day our students shared their posters with the 1^st graders and kindergarteners.  They did an amazing job explaining their work.

Then comes the computer work.  Google has amazing tools that you can use.  One thing they have is Google forms.  I love this tool because it allows you to easily and intuitively create a survey that you can publish on the Internet.  This form is linked to a Google spreadsheet where responses are instantly tallied.   I pulled up the form an all the computers in the media center.  When classrooms came down, students got to vote and when a classroom was finished voting they moved over to the Smart Board and we could show them their results coming in real time. 

Char Walsh had created an enlarged map of the school using her document camera.  As results came in we had each class find their room and color it either blue or red to match who won the election in their classroom.  As a follow up second grade students colored a map of the United States at home as the results came in.  The next day we were able to compare results between the national election and the ECC election.

I loved this unit.  Students were engaged and excited.  We got to use technology.  We did a lot of writing; we got to practice graphing and comparing results.  It was fun and students bought into it in a way they probably wouldn’t have if it had stayed in the realm of this is an election and it is something we do, here are some examples of how it has happened in the past.  They got to experience it and be involved in the process.  They taught other students how to vote and educated them on the options.  It was amazing for me to see and I am so proud of my students.