Since our field trip to the capital and meeting with another mom for some ideas on how to make this unit more fun, I've decided to stop all the writing part of the study. Instead I'll spend time over the weekend and pull out 5 or 6 questions that I want the kids to learn relating to the Elections and Government and we'll discuss them. We've also got tons of books from the library that we are reading. So far it's been going much better, Zach still thinks it's boring, but so do I to be quite honest. So this week we discussed the following things:
- What is government?
- What form of Government do we have in the US?
- What forms of Government do other countries have?
- What is an Election?
- How did people vote along time ago?
- Describe the three levels of Government; Executive, Legislative, Judaical
- Talk about the seven steps a person takes to become president
- How are candidate's chosen?
- What is a primary and a caucus?
We actually got through all those questions without to much pain. I'm still using Amanda Bennent's Unit study on Elections, so I have the web links that she uses which really helped me find the answers to some of these questions. We even pretended that Matthew and Zachary were running for President under the same party and how we finally got to one person being nominated.
Along with all the discussion, I found a fun recipe to make to keep with our RED, WHITE, and BLUE food theme. It was super easy!
Melt some butter in a saucepan and add some marshmallows (see where I'm going)
Add your favorite food coloring! We also did Blue
You then add some Rice Krispies
Take some of the rice krispies and make them into balls
We then added a little pull apart licorice to make a loop and they were Election ornaments
Hopefully everyone has a recipe to make rice krispie treats, we just colored ours and made them into balls, they did not last the whole week and I don't think Kenan got one. | 
