Quick Summary
Minitex staff and librarians who work with eLibraryMN, Ebooks Minnesota, Minnesota Digital Library, and Resource Sharing work together to create monthly Resource Packs for Minnesota schools to highlight content that can be used in the classroom. This month's pack features fiction, nonfiction, and primary sources about Elections.
You may have noticed that it is election season! Although it is impossible to miss the election stories in the news, it can be challenging to know where to start talking about this essential part of our democracy with students. Perhaps zooming out on the larger picture of the history of elections and voting in the United States will help to frame the topic in an approachable way.
This month, our Resource Pack team has curated selections of learning resources related to elections from eLibraryMN, Ebooks Minnesota, and Minnesota Digital Library. These primary sources, secondary sources, ebooks, and research databases are grouped by grade level and can be used in a variety of classrooms. Take a look at our October Resource Pack today!
Starting on the K-8 Tab, you’ll find a collection of resources from eLibrary Minnesota and Ebooks Minnesota that explain the history of elections and voting for those who are new to these topics. While the youngest students may need introduction to elections themselves in Britannica, middle schoolers will be ready to dive into angles on voting, such as voting rights and suffrage in EBSCO Explora. Gale in Context offers a variety of video, audio, journal article, and reference sources around the Election topic, and scrolling to the bottom of the page will always find related topics to expand your search, and you can find it on the middle or high school tabs.
Switching to the 9-12 tab, you will find a series of election-related debate topics in the Points of View Reference Center that will engage students in points, counterpoints, and overviews of critical questions. Want to have a healthy debate about the electoral college? Read Britannica’s overview and engage in the POV Reference Center’s collection of perspectives. Finally, if you need students to look up today’s newspaper perspectives from around the country, ProQuest US Newsstream will provide full text of the most current articles as they are released.
Ebooks Minnesota can also provide select titles for those interested in learning about elections and elected officials. Try titles such as Elect Me! or Understanding your Role in Elections for the younger crowd, and offer Life in Numbers: The Electoral College as a shared online text for students to study from a different angle.
The Minnesota Digital Library also contains many primary sources documenting elections and voting history, including early voting records, election maps, campaigning, polling places, and speeches. Students can learn more about how local, state, and national elections have worked in Minnesota over time using the materials in this guide (and more!).
Image credit: Students vote at Atwood Memorial Center, St. Cloud State University, November 1988. SCSU collection, https://collection.mndigital.org/catalog/stc:9702, accessed October 1, 2024.
