Voting Matters

• In this activity, students will read articles and look at data about voting in the United States. 
  
• Topics discussed include equal access to voting, the importance of voting, and how voting is related to climate justice. 

Positives

• This teaching resource has a student-version worksheet to easily upload onto learning management systems, such as Google Classroom.

Additional Prerequisites

• Teachers must make a free account to access the materials.
• There are a number of online resources in the worksheet that students will need to access for this activity.
  

Differentiation 

•  Consider using some of the worksheet questions as discussion questions in the classroom to make it more engaging with the students (such as "What are two examples of barriers that have kept people from voting in the past or present?") and/or have students work in groups to identify the answers to these questions and then present them to the classroom.
• In the section on Voting and Climate Justice, it is important to not villainize a particular political party so that all students feel comfortable participating in the activity. The teacher could highlight that the class is focusing on which members of Congress are climate deniers, rather than which party they represent.
• For more information about how climate and justice are connected, you could reference this video, this StC lesson plan, and this activity. 
  

There could be a data quality issue in the "Youth Turnout rates by age and election year" chart. Notice the curve appears to have a similar trend and pattern, which raises an eyebrow as the data source is not in a published website. However, when educator engages students on this task, they should take notice of this and possibly not use the chart. They can get this kind of chart from the EPA, New York Times, or other credible published sources. Aside from this shortcoming, this resource is recommended for teaching.