Reading Activity Choosing The President

What Reading Activity Choosing The President Actually Is

A reading comprehension activity centered on the presidential election process. That's it. Teachers use it in third through fifth grade social studies or civics units. The standard package includes a short passage about how presidents are chosen, a set of multiple choice or short answer questions, and sometimes a vocabulary section. It's generic educational material, nothing revolutionary. If you're looking for downloadable versions, you'll find them scattered across sites like TeachersPayTeachers, Education.com, ABC Teaching Resources, and Free-Reading-Comprehension.com. Most are free PDFs. A few premium ones run a couple dollars. The quality varies wildly. I've been designing and grading these kinds of activities for over a decade. The one thing nobody tells you is that the reading passages themselves are often written at a lower level than the questions require. You'll see a third grade passage where kids have to infer something that's never explicitly stated. That's a mismatch. Students get frustrated, teachers get frustrated, and nobody learns much.

Here's a practical tip that will actually help: before you give the activity to students, read the passage yourself and underline every claim that appears in the text. Then check each question against your underline list. Any question that doesn't map to an underlined claim needs to be rewritten or removed. Takes about five minutes for a two page activity and it prevents half the confusion you'll encounter.

How to Use This Activity Effectively

Don't just hand it out and walk away. The activity works best when you scaffold it. Read the passage aloud first. Pause after each paragraph and ask students to summarize what they just read in their own words. Then let them read it independently. After that, go through the questions together as a class before they work alone. This alone raises comprehension scores noticeably in my experience. The vocabulary section is usually the weakest part. Words like "democracy," "voter," and "campaign" appear in almost every version of this activity. Good words to include, but they're also overused. I started adding context clues to the passage itself rather than relying on a separate glossary. When the passage says "the candidates traveled across the country to meet with voters" instead of just defining "voters" separately, kids pick it up faster. It saves time and reduces cognitive load.

Common Problems and What Actually Works

I had a student last year who couldn't understand the difference between the Electoral College and the popular vote after completing this activity. The passage mentioned both but didn't explain the distinction clearly. He wrote on his answer sheet that "the president is chosen by people who count the votes." Not wrong per se, but revealing that the text hadn't done its job. I rewrote a small section that clarified the two-step process and re-distributed it. Took ten minutes. Another issue I keep seeing: these activities treat the election process as if it only applies to the general election. They skip primaries, caucuses, and conventions entirely. That's fine for a simple overview but it leaves a gap. If your students are advanced readers, add a supplementary paragraph about how candidates are narrowed down before the general election. It takes maybe a paragraph and makes the whole topic make more sense later on. The biggest limitation of most Reading Activity Choosing The President materials is that they assume a two party system. The questions are written around candidates from two parties. That's accurate for most American students but it's worth noting if you teach in a district with a diverse population where families follow elections in other countries. A brief note about how other democracies work differently can prevent confusion without derailing the lesson.

Where to Find Reliable Versions

The National Geographic Education site has a solid free version that's fact-checked. Scholastic's teaching resources section has another good one that's tied to their reading series. If you're using Google Classroom, search for "Choosing the President reading comprehension" and filter by recent uploads. The date matters because some older versions still refer to electoral college rules that have been updated or simplified in newer curricula. I tend to bookmark three versions and rotate between them depending on the class level. Average readers get the simpler passage with more visual aids. Stronger readers get the denser text with inferential questions. The activity itself doesn't change much across versions, so it's not like you're doing extra work long term.