Everybody has the right to vote…make your vote count!

Today at nursery we had our very own General Election which ties in nicely with our school recently being awarded the 'Recognition of Commitment' towards our Rights Respecting Schools award. HOORAY! This is a key part of our journey to achieving level 1. We relentlessly promote how important it is that children know that they are valued and that their voice is respected and heard. Even though our children are only 3 and 4 years old, they can talk about and understand their rights and how these can be fulfilled. 

As part of our British values curriculum and learning about the articles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which are both woven through our planning for the children's personal, social and emotional development, it is important to teach the children about the democracy of Great Britain so that they know that they are entitled to their opinion and that their opinion counts.

We talked about the General Election being a very important day, when grown ups all over the country had the right to vote. We said that it was their responsibility to make a really big decision and could choose which ‘team’ or party they thought would do the best job and make the best choices for Great Britain and that when the children were older, they would be able to take part in the real voting too.

Debbie told us that she was going to vote at the polling station near to her house later in the day and Ruth had already voted by putting her vote in the post earlier in the week. We also said that some people like to keep their vote a secret but that others were happy to share their views with their friends and that that was their choice.

We looked at some of the advertising that the children may have seen in the run up to the election and the logos and slogans that the parties used to try to persuade people to vote for them. We also talked about the different things that were important to each party such as education, the health service, housing, the environment, people being safe and people going to work.

We showed the children our nursery voting slips, talked about where and how to vote in nursery and reinforced with the children that is was very important to use their vote to voice their ideas.

We all had a go at voting, by putting a cross next to one of the 4 colours which represented The Liberal Democrats, The Green Party, The Conservative Party and The Labour Party. We then folded up our votes and posted them into the ballot box, just like the grown ups do.

The children were absolutely fantastic as they were voting and remembered lots of the ideas that we had talked about. They were really excited and chatted lots about what they were doing.

Comments included

“I want the ones that said they were strong”

“I like elephants so I’m picking green ‘cos they like animals”

“Those children look like the ones at nursery and they look like they’re having a party…so I’m picking red”

We discussed that when we had voted, the votes had to be counted and then we would find out who had won…the party with the most votes would be the winner.

Some of the Big Thinking group helped at the end of the session to open up the ballot box and count up all the votes to find out the result before we left nursery…It was a very close vote but the results were as follows…

The children were really excited to find out the results and we discussed that it was sometimes tricky when the team or party that you voted for didn’t win, but by having a democratic vote where the party with the biggest number of votes won, was the fairest way of making the decision.

The children were also excited to tell their grown-ups about our vote at nursery and remind their grown-ups to vote if they hadn’t already, as it was their right too, to have their say.

We’ve got our result for nursery…but we will have to wait until tomorrow to see which party actually won the real general election!