Topical Art – Vote for ME!

Well it’s been all over the news for weeks…Australian’s voted on Saturday, and unless you do not have a mailbox, listen to the radio, watch TV, pick up a paper or walk the streets…it would have been impossible for you to avoid the myriad of campaign marketing messages.

Most teachers would have discussed the election in some form over the past weeks – whether it be to look at the candidates, research policies, or for a lesson in parliament and politics.

Here at Colorific of course we take a creative arts view of the election!  Now that it’s (almost!) all over, have your students see if they can tell you what they remember about the candidates, their advertising messages, their ads in general.  Draw a brain map on the board to try and make some sense of the information they are giving you.

Once you have it all down, assess the main elements students remember from the campaigns – was it the visual aspects such as posters and flyers, were the TV ads more memorable, perhaps they went to the polling booths on Saturday with their parents and saw the campaign messages there?

Now the fun begins…have students create their own individual campaigns!  Let them create their own political party with 2 or 3 main policies, make a logo, slogan, and campaign posters.  This can be done as group work (small groups would be best) or individually.

Colorific have some blank resources to use to create some great campaign materials – how about die cut T-shirt cards to create a crazy campaign T, and some blank card flags with sticks to wave wildly!  Use some large sheets of drawing paper to make some posters – and if you have the resources maybe students could even record small ads that you could view…the topic is limitless!

Make it fun and encourage students to be colourful and wacky when they create their slogans and logos.  Maybe you could create a class ‘senate’ voting paper with each students name and ‘political party’ on it and everybody has to vote their top 3 or 5 (anonymously) and you can tally them up…just for fun of course…or perhaps you could then spend a day or an afternoon with the winning students running the classroom!