The First "R"
By Mary Ellen Bafumo

You might think the first "R" is reading, but actually it's responsibility, a very specific responsibility of which teachers are more aware during an election year. It's the obligation to develop citizenship and civic awareness in students.

Social studies has taken a back seat, if it has any at all, to reading and math. The resulting dearth of information about our government is clearly documented in dismal NAEP scores. The habit of acquiring civic information and the motivation to take an active civic role requires careful cultivation through teaching, practice and role modeling.

There's no better time than election time to bring civic awareness into your classroom. The key is to integrate election information and issues into regular classes and routines. Each of the following ideas is brief but has the cumulative effect of creating a "news habit."

1. Assign a four-person news team to a one week "election news beat." Designate an international, national, state and local news reporter whose task each day is to share the headline story from their beat in a two-minute presentation. Provide a daily newspaper and make this an assignment that's shared before class begins.
2. Use newspaper or magazine stories on election campaigns to teach reading, vocabulary, sentence structure, paragraphing and comprehension. Practice oral reading and extract new spelling words from the content, too.
3. Each week, assign a group of four to distribute a class voting poll for the presidential election. The group reports results to the class during math time, compares results to those of the previous week, calculates changes and leads a brief discussion around the reasons for any changes.
4. Have students create a bulletin board for the presidential election. As homework, they read about the issues, post articles of interest, summarize them and/or write opinions. Students peruse the board during the day and twice weekly discuss postings for 10 minutes before dismissal.
5. Write math word problems around candidate travel, fund-raising, poll results and voting predictions.
6. Develop map skills by using campaign stops to identify locations, distances between stops, nearby rivers, mountains, weather patterns, demographics, etc.

Mary Ellen Bafumo is a Program Director for the Council on Educational Change, an Annenberg legacy group.