Wednesday, September 19, 2007

LESSON PLAN: ECONOMICS

I recently had to write an inquiry-based economics lesson plan for fifth grade. I choose opportunity cost and scarcity as my subjects and applied them to the Missouri Grade Level Expectations (GLE) although they could easily be adapted for your state’s requirements. Of course, I used a comic (Amelia Rules!) in the lesson plan as well.

In this lesson, the students are accessing prior knowledge of the subjects from the book, Kira-Kira, which had already been read aloud to the class. I believe in reading aloud to elementary students every day for at least 20 minutes. You could use Kira-Kira or not.

If you have not taught or been exposed to an inquiry-based lesson plan (as opposed to the Madeline Hunter format) then this may look strange to you. As I see it, things are moving in this direction and the university expects most lessons to be in this format. So that is what I use. Besides, I think the inquiry-based lessons are far superior in most circumstances. Again, I think a teacher could take the ideas and activities and put them in a direct-instruction format if that is what you or your school prefer.

The lesson plan and accompanying information is stored below in jpeg format. Feel free to use them. If you use this in the classroom, PLEASE, let me know how it works. I would love the feedback. You can do so by leaving comments or emailing me privately (abikerbard@mac.com). If you have questions about the lesson, be sure to ask. I’ll do my best to give you further explanations before you use it. You will find that this lesson plan is linked in my Amelia Rules! review.

Subject: Economics (Scarcity and Opportunity Cost)
Grade: 5th
Comic Literature: Amelia Rules! The Whole World’s Crazy by J. Gownley (Ch. 4)







1 comment:

Unknown said...

Economics is one of my toughest subjects in high school, partly because our teacher did not really prepare good lesson plans to guide his discussion. He just went with how he thought economics would be interpreted by an old man.