Politics & Elections

The through-line

Between elections, who organizes political power — and when the election comes, how do they come after your vote?

Content overview

Parties first, elections second. The unit opens on where the two big-tent parties came from and what they actually do, hands students an ideology survey so the question becomes personal, then turns to the machinery: how elections run, how citizens and organized interests push on government, and how a campaign advertisement is built to move a voter. It ends with students making one of their own.

How to use the lesson pages

• Five lessons: 1 the development of American political parties, 2 the Democrats & Republicans escape room, 3 the roles of parties and the create-your-own-party assignment, 4 elections plus influencing government and propaganda techniques, and 5 the Political Campaign Advertisement Project.
• Ten labelled source days become five lesson pages. Source Days 3 and 4 are marked "Cummings Out" and hold only a link to a substitute-plans document each; source Days 7 and 8 hold only the word "Plans" linking a single document — the same URL on both days. Those four days have no lesson page, because a page whose entire content is "open this document" is an empty shell. All three documents are linked below under "Days the page covers with a document only", so nothing is lost.
• Source Days 9 and 10 are one lesson. They run the same Political Campaign Advertisement Project on consecutive days, split only because teacher-made exams took 1st and 3rd period on the first day and 2nd and 4th on the second. That is a scheduling split, not two different lessons, so Lesson 5 covers both.
• Every lesson offers three tracks — Honors, Standard, Foundational — selectable on the page, matching the rest of the Civic Literacy units. The source contains no differentiation of any kind; the tracks are authored here and vary scaffolding, pace, and how independently a student works, never the materials themselves.
• No timings anywhere. The source gives an ordered sequence per day and not a single per-move minute, so every duration on every lesson page is an estimate and each page says so.
• Three gaps a teacher should know about before planning. Source Day 5 (Lesson 3) prints "Key Questions: #1 - #2 -" with both left blank. Source Day 6 (Lesson 4) — the day the unit finally reaches elections — carries no objective and no key questions at all, just three bullets; the objective on that page is derived from the materials it names and is labelled as such. And the source repeats one identical objective and one identical pair of key questions across its Days 1, 2 and 5, which is copy-paste rather than three days of planning.
• The page carries no NC standards codes, no dates beyond two bare day-and-month strings with no year, and no homework. None of those have been supplied here.
• The unit's own title promises politics and elections, but eight of the ten source days are about political parties. Elections proper appear on one day, inside two presentations. If this unit gets rebuilt, that is where the hole is.