Teaching the History of Voting Rights in the USA
Image credit: Goodreads Before the election, we wanted to focus on something other than the actual candidates as many students (and teachers, including me) were feeling so stressed about the outcome. So we learned about the history of voting rights in the United States of America. We started, as we so often do, by reading a picture book to the students. We read Granddaddy’s Turn, A Journey to the Ballot Box and talked about what we knew and what we could infer about Grandaddy and the narrator. In this excellent book by Michael S. Bandy and Eric Stein, a young boy goes with his grandfather to vote shortly after the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. It appears that they are in the rural South. The narrator’s grandfather is dressed up and has waited a long time to be able to vote. However, they are turned away and disrespected. Granddaddy is told he needs to read a complex text, and