Rewording the Story - with our main activity for this session all about planning and coming up with stories (the story behind their political figures), I thought I’d give the students a storytelling warmup. They’ve also been very eager to read these days, so they started the warmup by reading for 5ish minutes. After they finished, they had to pick a word from the extract they read, then write it onto the digital screen. Next step, they paired up, and they had 2-3 minutes to write a short story that used as many of the words on the board as possible (preferably not their own).

Planning the Mock Election - We gave them the brief: redesign our classroom to be ready to conduct an election. Their tasks included setting up the poster walls (featuring the three parties and ensuring each wall was appropriately labelled), getting all the videos onto three separate ipads (all of party 1 promo videos on ipad 1, all party 2 on ipad 2, and same for 3), updating any videos if they needed it (finishing animations or fixing audio), adding embellishments to the party poster walls (names of the parties). The students ended up naming the parties: Party 1: Outdoor, Party 2: Fun, Party 3: Nature. These were chosen based on the prominent theme amongst the policies, and all decided upon by the kids themselves.

Creative Cubby Building - we're still working with the cubby idea, but this time Kirsti tried them with some popsticks! The students chose a creative habit that they used most during the session, then a popstick with that colour on it. They wrote their name on it and placed them next to our growing creative cubby. We’re thinking these might make good fence posts, or tiles on a roof of a creative village or suburb that we’ll be building during future reflection activities.

Despite some messiness with students running in lots of directions, this session ended up being a great success, with the students leading their own planning and design of the election hall, thinking about eye-catching colours for their parties, and making some targeted edits to their own videos (or helping other students edit theirs). It was a wonderful display of creative collaboration on all fronts, with students teaming up to transform the classroom and prepare for next week!

It was great to see the students take the initiative during this lesson, with the extra autonomy they had been given, and the wide array of tasks to do. 

We need to shuffle some tables around to manage the queue of voters during the election day.

We need to design new voting slips that suit the three parties the students have developed.

This mock election day will have various students and staff from around the school visiting and voting on the parties. We can gather photos of the event, and count up and announce the votes and winning party.