Teachable moments

One of the great things about homeschooling is that we have so many opportunities for those "teachable moments".

I had a good one today when I took my youngest two (ages 8 and 6) along with me to vote in a special election for County Executive. They had lots of questions:

"Are you voting for President again?"
"What's a county executive?"
"Why did the lady ask for your name and where we live?"
"How do you vote?"

So, we were able to discuss:

How each geopolitical entity (city, county, state, country) has its own type of chief executive (mayor, county executive, governor, president)

That Presidents are elected for a four-year term.

That we have a secret ballot, and why, and how ("See, I don't put my name on the ballot.")

That we can only vote once ("No cheating! Everybody gets just one vote.")

A bit of current events ("The people in Iraq voted on a constitution last weekend.")

A very brief primer on "What's a Constitution?"

... and so on.

Now this isn't upper level civics, by any means, but it was a chance to introduce big concepts for little people to think about.

Of course, they also learned that voting is important, because they went along with me and saw that I thought it was a very important duty of citizenship.

Maybe that was the best thing of all for them to learn.