2024 Presidential Election - Donald Trump - Kamala Harris - GOOGLE - Unit 2

⭐ RECENTLY UPDATED FOR THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS ⭐

 With the 2024 Election Day fast approaching, students will be surrounded by presidential election coverage everywhere they go. Although this purchase was created specifically with special education students in mind, it is a great starting point for an introduction to elections for ANY classroom!

This unit includes a fun game that is formatted to help your students understand the electoral college in an engaging and academic way! My classes have LOVED playing it and I am sure yours will too! In essence, the class is divided into 2 groups and each group is given a "budget" of $100 to campaign across the United States. Whichever team spends more in a state wins the points for that state. Whoever has the most points at the end - WINS!

This activity is specifically formatted to be used with Google Drive and is compatible with Google Classroom. Google Drive is an amazing resource that many educators are now using as an interface to support 1:1 digital instruction in the classroom. I pair it up with Google Classroom (a free website) that allows me to digitally send each student in my class a copy of the worksheets that they later submit to me for grading. Students simply type their responses in the colored boxes. It is an amazing paper-free process and the kids LOVE working on these worksheets on the computer.

This lesson is a great way to challenge kids to start thinking about the candidates in a more engaging manner and challenges them to use their skills to create meaningful information during this election year!

⭐ Please note: This unit has been used in special education classrooms with much success. If you feel like you need a more detailed lesson plan for your students, this may not be the best fit. This lesson was intended to introduce students with limited reading and writing skills to the basic concepts of elections in a meaningful manner ⭐

How I Use This In My Classroom: 

Due to distance learning, my district is doing instruction 100% online. I plan to assign this activity to each of my students on Google Classroom. I will break the lesson into two parts. Slides one through nine can be completed either independently by the students or in small group sessions. Then for slides ten to twenty, I plan on splitting my students into two groups online to simulate them "campaigning" for electoral points across the country. You can use features like breakout rooms or different Google Meets links to have the teams brainstorm how much they would like to spend on each state. Then, when the entire class meets together again, everyone can virtually report out their totals. Whoever spent the most wins that state! This is a great way to get kids to start thinking about different campaign strategies (Spend your budget on bigger states? Spread your budget equally across all fifty states? A combination of both?). This has always been such a fun lesson to do in class and one that kids will likely always remember for years to come!

Purchase Includes DIGITAL ACCESS To: 

• Nonfiction passage briefly comparing democrats and republicans with eight corresponding comprehension questions
• One worksheet reviewing facts on Kamala Harris
  
• One blank table for students to fill information out from previous page
• One worksheet reviewing facts on Donald Trump
• One blank table for students to fill information out from previous page
• One graphic organizer to compare differing viewpoints
• One digital cut and paste activity comparing differing viewpoints
• One presidential election reflection writing activity
• Teacher directions for electoral college map game
• Electoral college map game worksheets
• One game reflection worksheet