Back Drawing - A classic drawing guessing game! Students pair up and get one piece of paper each. The first student turns away from the second, while the second places the paper on the back of the first student. The second student must choose an object that both they and the first student can see, then draw it on the paper, ensuring that the first student can feel the pen/pencil as it draws. The first student must try to guess what the second student is drawing. Minimal clues are allowed, with the second student staying mostly silent for the entire process. Once the first student guesses, roles are reversed.

The students seemed to really enjoy this, with only a modicum of difficulty. We had to allow more and more clues for some students, while other students swapped multiple times during the time we had for this warmup.

Persuasive Poster Designing - with previous sessions being somewhat more structured, we wanted this main activity to be much more student led, with us giving them the general task required, and them being able to work away most of the rest of the session on their own. We gave them a quick intro (reminder, since they’ve already done persuasive posters before) to the elements of a persuasive poster, then handed out the drawings they made in a previous session. They had to use the drawing as their ‘political party figure’ who stood for their chosen policy, then draw it all in on their poster.

Apparently many of the students were working on these in the following mornings after this session - wonderful feedback!

We brought back the creative elections for this sessions reflection activity. I decided it had been long enough since their last vote, so we tried it again to see how the results differed. While the actual votes didn’t change too much since last time, the discussions around it, and the student response, was much more constructive - they understood more what they were voting for this time!

We found this more fluid approach to the main task to work really well. The more independent students were happy to work on their posters with minimal guidance, while this freed us up to help out the students who needed it.

The students are enjoying the personal angle we’re taking with our exploration of politics curriculum, using these policies that they came up with and allowing them to figure out all the benefits and challenges with campaigning for them, and implementing them.

We’re in Stage 1 of the three stage buildup towards our election, planned for session 8. Next week will be persuasive speeches. Students will choose a policy to write and record a persuasive speech supporting their policy. 

In line with keeping our resource requirements low, next week will only need basic paper for our creative cubby building reflection activity.

These posters will be displayed in the voting hall (a classroom at the school that we designate as the voting room) in session 8, so there will be plenty of opportunities for the school community (particularly those we have chosen to vote) to see the work in our class.