Deal or No Deal

Deal or no deal? How does money make trading easier? Why was money invented? How do people and companies decide if a trade is fair? 

These were all questions the students asked as they worked in our economics unit. The unit began with a review of some key vocabulary:  producers, consumers, goods, services, human resources, capital resources, natural resources, productive resources, and opportunity cost. 

The following two weeks explored how supply and demand affect price and how people can trade for the goods and services they want or need. We "traded around the world" and found that some of our peers are very good business people! These games also taught the meaning of scarcity! The students quickly learned that if they didn't have something worth trading, there was a high probability that the good they wanted would be gone!

We also discovered that specialization and assembly lines made the production of goods much more efficient! Play dough hamburgers have never been so informative!

Our summative project was to open an Ice Cream Shop. Based on the favorite ice cream flavors and toppings of the class, each small business was assigned a specific number of ice cream scoops and toppings.

The Goal:  Make your favorite ice cream sundae--at least 2 scoops of ice cream and at least 2 toppings

 

Day 1--trading day

Day 2--money day (where the shops tried to make the most money)

Prices varied based on the shops' ideas of supply and demand. Who would have thought that $6 scoops of triple chocolate ice cream would sell!

In the end, the students decided that it was much easier to get their perfect sundae using money. They didn't have to make sure they had what someone else wanted, and they had a much better chance to move quickly through the shops. Even still, many of the kids didn't get to create their perfect sundae. 

And we decided we needed some real ice cream!

Sound Challenges

I realize we've been done with our Sound unit for weeks... but the kids loved the unit and I thought I'd share some of the work we did.

Visiting Ms. Streit's classroom to see oobleck "dance" from the vibrations of the song through the amp.

The lower the pitch, the faster the oobleck danced... until it jumped right off the amp!

This unit involved lots of hands-on experiments. The kids tested how well sound vibrations moved through solids, liquids, and the air. We tested with high and low pitches by changing the length and tension of the instruments. We also tested with loud and soft volumes using megaphones (not my favorite day).

To wrap up the unit, the students wrote a Sound and Light Magazine. This summarized their research and practiced using nonfiction text features. They also completed Sound Challenges, combining the investigations throughout the unit to solve a problem.