The Colorado Adventure

Government co-op

I had 17 or so kids at the library today for my co-op. We were just getting the basics about the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bills of rights, amendments and branches of government.

We started with a time line of events from the start of the Revolutionary war, Declaration, Treaty of Paris, Constitutional convention, Bill of rights and the first President.

For the Declaration we saw a rough draft on-line here and then read the easy word version (read the whole thing here.) Think of the easy version like a King James Bible vs. an NIV Bible, it’s the same content and story, the words are just up to date.

Sometimes one group of people decide to split off from another group, and to become an independent country, as the laws of Nature and of God say that they can. But when this happens, if they want other people to respect them, they should explain why they are splitting off.
We think these things are obviously true:

People should not change their government without a good reason, so people usually suffer as long as they can under the government they have, rather than change it. But when there have been a lot of problems for a long time, it is their right and their duty to throw off that government, and to set up a better government.

Then we played Declaration signers Bingo. Quick fact, Jefferson wasn’t there to sign it, he was in France.

Next we listened to the Preamble song from Schoolhouse rock and talked about what it says in easy speak (which you can find here.) Be warned: this song will get stuck in your head!

Here’s what the preamble looks like in words kids can understand:

We, the people of the United States, are writing this Constitution in order to have justice, to have peace, to be able to defend ourselves, to be better off, and to be free – not just for ourselves, but for all our children and descendants.

We talked about what tranquility and posterity mean (good thing the founding fathers decided to use rhyming words.) We talked about what the Constitution sets up, 3 branches of government, laws, and some rights. They decided to spell out some of these rights so they wrote 10 (it was 12, but they couldn’t agree on the last 2) amendments called the Bill of rights.

We went over the first 10 amendments to the Constitution and read them in easy speak here. We talked about what the 1st amendment means, does it mean that you can go protest with guns in front of the capital? No, but you can peacefully walk around with signs to protest something. Can you say something bad or lie about someone? No, they can sue you for libel. Can you write anything you want? Well, again no, you can try, but if it’s not true you’ll get into trouble. The 5th amendment was known to my kids (we watch Law and Order a lot) no double jeopardy and you can’t be a witness against yourself. We talked about how hard it is to get amendments in the Constitution, after all it’s over 200 years old and there are only 27 amendments and 10 of those are original! We quickly went over the list of amendments, noting special ones (like 13 no slaves, 15 blacks can vote, 19 women can vote, 26 have to be 18 to vote.) Then we started talking about the branches of government.

Since we had already read the Constitution, which tells you about each part of the government and what they do, we played a little game. We taped up things about each branch to the proper branch on the tree.

Then we talked about how a bill becomes a law. We divided up into the House and Senate and everyone talked about what kind of bill they wanted.

Then they wrote a rough draft, went to committee, added some more stuff on to it, set a calendar date, read it on the floor, voted on it and sent it off to me. The senate table wrote 2 bills and even put numbers on them: SB 1000 and SB 7689, cool!

The House brought me their bill, it was for Children’s day. A day where kids get to eat whatever they want, get 50 books, go where they want and so on. I had to show 3 ways a bill can become a law, so I (as President) vetoed it. I told them ‘everyday is kids day’ to which the crowd went hostile! ‘But you get a teacher’s night out!’ Grace yelled. They took their bill back and voted again, got more than 2/3rds to say ‘yes’ and it became a law anyway. The Senate brought me their bills, 1 said that if a citizen steals from another citizen they will go to jail for a year. The other bill said that people who mistreat animals will go to jail. They even dated it! I said as President that it happened to be on the bottom pile of stuff and I didn’t see it for 10 days, which was good for them because then it became a law. One person asked me at the end if it did become a law since I never looked at it, I said yes and he was so relieved.

The last thing we did was play the House against the Senate in a trivia contest (the Senate won.) You can find trivia games here and here. You can go here for a free copy of the Constitution/Declaration/Bill of rights.

That was lots of fun!