Hello Fellow Classmates,
As I write this blog post, I have to admit even though I enjoy math, studying economics is not the most exciting topic to me but after our class on Tuesday, I now see how wrong I was! I never imagined that our economics lesson would include reading diary entries and studying artwork. I liked that we began the class with a turn-and-talk on the core economic principles, then moved into the decision making model and important ideas including key vocabulary to provide to students. This class helped me to understand the importance of preparing an interactive lesson and providing students with an opportunity to experience economics in different ways. Such as Dr. Bland telling us about a grocery shopping experience with her daughter when she was learning about opportunity cost in school. Throughout history we see the importance of economics and our students will need to know these principles to function as good citizens. As we saw in class, economics touches all parts of our lives, so we have to ensure our students are getting the foundation needed to reach their full potential. It seems we are now moving to a more cashless system for buying and selling goods. How do you think this will affect our society and how do we prepare our students for this? Here’s an interactive link from PBS kids that may be helpful with economic learning: Cyberchase . Topics . Money | PBS KIDS
Our activity of reviewing primary source documents of Ephraim Coleman, an ordinary 68-year-old man who kept a diary was fun and comparing different sections of the diary to get insight into his daily life over the period of a year was interesting. This is another great way to have students look for economic principles in everyday life. I especially liked utilizing the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) to help with researching an important person in American history, although I did find it hard to think of just questions without stopping to discuss, so I was tapped once 😊 by Dr. Bland. I would never think to teach a history lesson in this manner, it was an “aha” moment for me. At the beginning of the semester, I really saw history as just facts and figures to learn, which is how I was taught history in school. We did not have any interactive activities to make history exploratory, exciting, and wanting to dive deeper to learn more. I don’t remember hearing about economics until high school and it wasn’t a study of it, but essentially just a definition to learn so this has been eye-opening to me. In our slides for this week’s class, Drs. Stohr and Bland have provided great links on teaching economics in elementary education. One in particular, the Virginia Council on Economic Education, provides entire lesson plans for interactive teaching of economics to elementary students. I reviewed a few of them and will keep as a resource for lesson planning. I now understand how important it is to start economic education early. Here’s a couple of links I hope will help you regarding this: yl_220304.pdf (socialstudies.org) ; Economics For Kids And Teenagers | PBS LearningMedia
So, my final questions are: for this week’s class, did you have an “aha” moment? If so what was it? Also, do you remember when you were taught about economics in school? What was your experience? Any other thoughts on this session? It really was a lot of fun with economics and it is always so helpful to me to hear your thoughts; I get a better perspective on what we’ve learned. Looking forward to hearing from you!
Thanks, Tera