Engaging in the U.S. Presidential Election
A lot of home educators want to engage their students in learning about contemporary U.S. politics, especially the upcoming presidential election. It can be hard to know where to start. There’s so much political noise to parse that many adults don’t understand what the key issues are.
Presidential Election 2020: A Guide for Young People, by Simplify Homeschool, is a brilliant resource that can help prep your student for the 2020 elections. Within its 31 pages, author Peter Orvetti breaks down the candidates and issues that are key to this specific election cycle, while helping students understand the presidential election process in general. Orvetti is a writer, intelligence analyst, and political reporter, which makes him the perfect resource for this material. He manages to stay impartial while covering all the key points related to the presidential election.
A Timely Resource
No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, this guide can offer a jumping-off point for your students to start investigating the issues and making informed decisions about their own political beliefs. This means that the guide is perfect to use right now, at the beginning of the election cycle, because it offers enough information to engage with political news as it emerges. Alternately, if your student just needs the basics, this unit study can stand alone as a solid overview of the most important issues.
There are a few questions after each section to engage learners, and graphics to help visualize the facts. The guide can be easily adapted one way or another to use for students of all ages, and it’s free to access here, so you can look it over and decide whether it will work for you.
Topics covered are:
+Why we’re already seeing coverage about the presidential election when voting won’t happen until November 2020
+Who’s running so far
+Descriptions of the two major parties
+Reasons why people run for president
+The big issues being considered in this election
+Identity politics
+Political media coverage
+Third-party or independent candidates
+The electoral college
+Timing of the remaining phases of this election cycle
+Other elections
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