Kindergarten votes!

"My dad is voting for Barack Obama, and I'm voting for Barack Obama, too," said one of my students on Monday, very matter-of-factly. Because, after all, it is a free country. Why not let Kindergartners vote?

So we did ...

With either an "M" or an "O", my fifteen Kindergartners cast their ballots -- but not without proper introduction.

The day before we had read in small groups what we call our (Scholastic) Kindergarten magazine, which featured the voting process, complete with curtain and all. On Election Day, I brought our voting box to a big group circle to reemphasize a few things about the concept of voting:

Voting in our country is a great privilege and it's often why so many people love to live here. It means everyone gets to choose what they want for the country. Sometimes its for the president, like this year, but there are other important people to choose to make decisions for us. So, it's really important that we all vote and make our choice.

However, that choice that we make is also very private for some people. That's why there are big curtains at voting stations: so that no one will see what you choose, because it is your choice and yours alone. In the olden days, when voting was public, sometimes friends were very mean to each other because they made different choices, and said mean things like "I won't be your friend anymore", or they didn't invite them to birthday parties. Is that a nice friend thing to do? ("Noooo!") Of course not. So, people decided to keep their votes private so that everyone remembered: everyone makes their own choices. And now, it's your turn!

With that, I handed out papers and pencils, the students wrote down their letters, folded the paper, and turned them in. Then, I handed out blank white boards, markers and erasers, because it was already time to count the votes with our new shortcut: tally marks!

"One, two, three, four:

lay it across and close the door!"

Soon enough, the results were in:

I think my favorite part was the fact that - as far as I could tell - they all believed that their votes were really going to be included in the ones reported on the evening news. Who was I to contest?

Someday, they will.