The project uses role play to engage the children as residents of a village/town in which they are also councillors. Acting in role, the children learn about decision making and consequences of decisions through a variety of exciting Literacy, Geography and PSHE learning activities. The topic concludes with looking at the real world of local politics and planning ways in which to persuade more people to vote at local level.

This pack aims to cover a significant number of Literacy objectives. In trials we have found the activities to be very effective in engaging children, especially in the upper primary phase. The more cross-curricular the approach, the more effective the project will be and the pack is designed to facilitate this.

PRIMARY VOTE aims to excite and motivate children. It stimulates their interest in an imaginary town in which all the class live. This will enable them to consider several “real-life” scenarios in an engaging and creative way.

Primary Vote provides a themed week of curricular activities with the following aims: -

● To create a strong level of interest in democracy in primary children that will pay dividends in future years
● To use the natural enthusiasm of children to promote democratic engagement to their parents and social networks
● To provide attractive material for the media in order to communicate the message about voting in local elections to an even wider audience

Click here for National Curriculum objectives

The resources currently on the site are intended for Years 5 and 6 although it could easily be adapted for use in Years 3 and 4 or Key Stage 3.

Subject to interest, we intend developing additional resources for Years 3 and 4 during 2008. Once local authorities or schools have purchased a login account they will be able to use all resources with no further charge for three years.

The project could be focussed over one week where the class takes “democracy” as its theme. It would be easy to adapt the plans to use the material in a longer term planning framework too. Word versions of the planning grids can be downloaded from our password-protected Resources section. This allows teachers to adapt the plans for their own children and school planning frameworks.

If your LEA has purchased the resource for your school, please use your school email account to send your name and role to primaryvote[at]wyed.co.uk for a password to access this section of the site.

Resources for each unit are detailed in the lesson plans and can be found here. To maximise impact it is recommended that you provide a separate folder for all the week's work. This will make it seem more important to the children.

We hope you enjoy using this pack and that it is useful. However, everything can be improved. Please use our contact form to email questions, comments and suggestions to us. Amendments can be made to web based files immediately. Please do let us have your comments, ideas and experiences for others to benefit from and to help us develop and improve the resource.