Lesson Plans | Endangered animal bingo, little presidents, and pranks – Part 2

I have one class of 4emes and try to do something a little more challenging with them. Also, apparently their tastes are radically different from the slightly younger kids, so I try to take that into account too. This week, there were local elections going on, so I decided to do a lesson where we talked a little about current issues.

Pretending to be President

Introduction

I’d start out by asking the following questions:

• What happened in the news recently (other than Zayn leaving One Direction)? Some told me about the flight that went down, etc. and I’d asked what happened in the local department (the election).
• What were some issues in the election? They told me they don’t know much about politics, so instead I asked them…
• What are some problems in France? They often still drew a blank, so I’d usually move onto the exercise.

Presidential speech

I asked them to imagine that they were running for president and to write a speech about what they’d do concerning:

• social
• economic, and
• environmental

issues. I gave them 5-10 minutes to work on it and walked around to check how they were doing. One student told me he would cancel school (pretty popular choice!), and I asked him what the students would do. He told me they’d all play video games, and when I asked him who’d do the work, he said the parents, or brothers and sisters once they were older. I generally tried to make sure they had one idea for each type of issue and preferred that they didn’t write complete sentences on the paper.

Next, I drew a flag of France on the board and had them each come up and present their speeches. I’d ask some follow-up questions (for example, if they said they’d help the environment, I’d ask how) or make sure they hit each type of issue. Then, I’d ask the class if they’d vote for the last candidate. In one class, we talked about the difference between “left” and “right” and talked about where the candidate’s views fell on the spectrum. It would have been neat to do a mock election as well, but they were generally good about picking out speeches with higher quality suggestions.

We’d then discuss what was similar about the speeches as a roundabout way of getting them to notice what the problems are in France (many mentioned getting rid of taxes…). With this lesson, it was helpful to have indirect ways of getting to the answers I was looking for. Even though it was a little disappointing at first to not be able to discuss the issues as I’d hoped, I had fun hearing what they had to say and they seemed to want to participate, so it worked out well in the end!