Creating a Classroom Congress

I always said that I thought teaching social studies would be fun. Due to how our schedule was, I haven't been able to teach it for the last 3 years. Each person on my team was assigned a speciality content area (Science, Art, Social Studies, or Health- or what we call SASH time) and we taught the whole grade that content through a rotation. This school year though, things changed and now I was going to teach all the content areas just to my class alone. Yes, it was going to be a lot more work for me, but I was so excited to change things up! And social studies has been one of my favorite SASH content areas to teach!

This past rotation was all about the United States Government. We did a lot of background learning about what government is, why we have it, and how it is structured. We watched a lot of short videos I found on-line and used our text book to learn some vocabulary. After we learned about the U.S. Constitution and the 3 Branches of Government, we began to talk about how a bill becomes a law.

If you want more information how I taught this first part described above (which I found to be super helpful to prepare us for this next part), head over to my personal blog, Tales of a Tenacious Teacher, to find the resources I used and created. But this post is going to explain how we created our own Classroom Congress to really make our learning come alive!

Step 1: Discussing the Process

We first learned how a bill became a law by watching the School of Rock video. Then, students worked together to fill in the blanks to this mini-poster I made. We discussed how the process is long and not ever bill even gets that far in the process. Of course I left out some parts for the sake of not overwhelming my 8 and 9 year olds. But once they knew the general process, it was time to apply it!

Step 2: Creating Your Constitution

The next day, we created the preamble to our own classroom constitution. We brainstormed different adjectives we wanted to use to describe our classroom. We voted, and you can see the word they chose. This was actually a very important step that I'll explain next.

We just did this on our SMARTboard- hence the messy writing.

Step 3: Writing Our Own Bills

After we had our constitution, it was time to start the bill and law creating process! I had students write bills that would help us reach this goal in our preamble. This limited students from getting too silly (as many said we should play games all day long or eat ice cream at every meal). We kept going back to, "Will this law help us form a more intelligent classroom?"

Step 4: Congress Positions

Students got to write 2 different bills. I collected them then for the next day. We turned our room into the Capitol building with the Senate on one side and the House of Representatives on the other. Surprisingly, making our desks into circles was the most challenge part of this day! Then students had to figure out which part of Congress they would be serving. I had these little slips printed and students just picked one out of a bucket. It was an easy way to sort them out into the houses. One senator slip said "Vice President" and one representative slip said "Speaker of the House." These would be the leaders of each group. There roles included:

• Reading the bill to their group
• Calling on people to share if more than one person was talking at once
• Getting "order" by knocking 3 times on their desk to quiet their group
• Completing the voting process
• Circling on the bill if it passed their house

Once they were in their groups, it was time for the debating! I gave each side of Congress one bill each. They were to discuss if they think this bill should be turned into a law for our classroom. They had to defend their reasons and listen to one another, not to mention make sure it would follow our preamble of our Constitution. This was great to practice our accountable talk!

To protect my kiddos, I covered up their faces with adorable Melonheadz Clipart :)

After some back and forth, the leader of each group would ask for a vote. They would say, "All in favor" and if people agreed, they would raise their hand. If more people had their hand up than down, it would pass and go onto the other house. If more people had their hands down than up, it would be eliminated. 

To protect my kiddos, I covered up their faces with adorable Melonheadz Clipart :)

Step 5: Debating and Voting Time

The first round, both houses did not pass the bill. So I gave each one another bill for them to repeat the process. They were going CRAZY! But in a good way! They were so engaged and passionate! I simply stood back and listened to the conversations- they were running the show all on their own. This time, both bills passed the house they were introduced in. The House of Representatives even changed one slightly before passing it on. We switched bills then to see if it could pass in the other house and sure enough- both did. They were so proud and realized that they had to work together not just with their own house but by thinking of the other house and what they might be thinking. And they kept our goal in mind the whole time. Perhaps I should invite real members of Congress into our classroom to see how it is done ;).

They begged for us to do it more, so we left our desks like this over the weekend and will resume our session on Tuesday. I'll be either signing these into laws or vetoing them on Wednesday before we wrap up this unit and move onto our next content area.

Do you teach government? How do you help students apply this tricky concept?