As our nation geared up for today’s presidential election, fourth-grade students at Stevenson Elementary School were on Friday casting ballots of their own in a replica of an election booth made by teacher Adriane Watt and a friend.
Most students weren’t shy about their choices.
“I watched a documentary on Romney and didn’t like it,” said President Obama supporter Ariana Nickell.
Chloe Shumate was choosing Mitt Romney for a couple of reasons, including the fact that he’ll “take away Obamacare,” she said.
The students had just filled out mock voter registration cards and been educated about the voting process in a series of lessons taught by Watt, a first-year teacher at SES.
“Throughout this past week we have discussed electoral votes and the electoral college,” Watt said Sunday. “We have also discussed each candidate’s stances on four subjects: education, economy, healthcare and the war.”
Watt took information for her lessons from Scholastic News for kids and enjoyed being able to discuss details about each candidate and his life with her students.
“The most important thing that I hope they took away from this week is how important it is to vote and to stand up for what you believe in,” she said.
Seventy-one fourth-grade Stevenson students were able to cast their “ballots” in Watt’s classroom thanks to accounts she set up on Edmodo, “which is a website similar to Facebook but is only used for classroom settings,” she said.
After each child chose their candidate, they received an “I voted” sticker.
“Once all the students in the fourth grade voted, we looked at each Social Studies class and saw who won that class,” Watt said. “Then we used what we learned about electoral votes and the electoral college to see which president won the electoral votes for the fourth grade.”
After all was said and done, the final results of Watt’s classroom “election” determined that 13 students voted for Mitt Romney and 58 voted for Barack Obama.








