Voters in action!

Quote of the day:

“When I went to mark the little circle on the ballot, my legs were shaking from excitement!”

No point in me saying much more than that.  I am so proud of how maturely and seriously the students approached this whole process this week and today.   A Municipal election is so much more relevant for the kids in some ways, but is also so complicated!   Good for them!

And not only were we voting, we were running the vote for all the classes participating.  So: checking voter lists (“Name please?”) scrutinizing ballots, counting and tallying votes.   Official name tags!

The Student Vote results are published following the release of the official election results.  So we’ll have a look at all of it next week.

Votes, fractions, pickles and other stuff

O.K., tomorrow is the vote!  I’ve been so impressed with the conversations we’ve had this week, and the maturity and seriousness the students have brought to investigating the various candidates.  Today, in addition to scoping out the candidates for Trustee, we discussed whether kids even should be thinking about this “grown-up” stuff, and why it might or might not be a good idea to participate.

And we did some cool exploring and reasoning and explaining about our representing in mathematics.  The task:  create (at least) six models that showed “half”.   Very interesting for me to see what they see as half and what they are not intuitively seeing as half.  Gives us some places to go (including one quarter and five-eighths), which is good!

 

Also, we ate pickles.

I’ll leave it to your children to explain why we ate pickles.  Suffice it to say, it had everything to do with this lovely book, which we are almost finished.   It will be available for borrowing for students who wish to read it on their own or bring it home for family reading.

 

Student Vote this Friday, October 19th

Every election in Canada, and currently for the municipal elections in Ontario, there is a parallel student vote.  This was begun by people who recognized that voter participation was low, and especially so among young people.  The reasoning is that by engaging kids even earlier than they can officially vote we may create more participation for life!  If you are interested in knowing more, here is a link.

But figuring out who to vote for is complicated! 

So today we began to look at the websites and media interviews for various mayoral candidates.   (Tomorrow we’ll look at councilors and the next day try to make sense of the trustees–it’s a lot!)

Our general questions in forming our own views are:

  • What would you keep the same? 
  • What would you change?
  • What could be improved?
  • What needs to be fixed or built?

We were also on the lookout for the candidates’ opinions about jobs, taxes, housing, roads, environment and development.  Obviously these are pretty grown-up ideas, but hey, we’re growing up!

To give you more chance to discuss this at home–and especially for those who were out of class today for the Fort Henry race or any other reason–here are the links we looked at today.   The very first one may be the easiest, as it has films of each candidate being interviewed.

Mayoral Candidates

All Candidates:

https://globalnews.ca/news/4530158/kingstons-mayoral-candidates-walk-and-talk-with-bill-hutchins/

https://www.thewhig.com/news/local-news/mayoral-candidates-discuss-issues-in-front-of-business-community

Bryan Paterson:

http://www.bryan4mayor.ca/platform-2018

Vicki Schmolka:

https://www.vickiformayor.ca/