This week we began our Economics unit in earnest. We spend a lot of time discussing the terms that often come up in Economics such as trade, barter, goods, services etc. We practiced role playing barter situations.
As part of this unit we will be carrying out jobs in the class to earn money. We had a competition to design the type of money we will be using as class currency.
The winner was Joao Paulo. Check out his money that we will now be using in our classrooom. Each of the children has signed a contract to engage in certain jobs to earn money. The jobs will be rotated.
Word Phrase Sentence
As part of this unit we will be doing a lot of reading and researching to find out how money was invented and has changed over time. We conducted an activity called Word/Phrase/Sentence which involved reading in pairs and selecting one word, one phrase and one sentence that summed up the text. The kids did a gret job with this activity for the first time.
Literacy Circles
As part of our language programme we are learning about Biographies. We will be working on these in literacy circles. This means the children select what they want to read so the group they are with will be interchanageable. The literacy circles involved reading biographies and putting unkown words on posted notes throughout the book for later reference. The children can opt to share the reading or read independently. Once everyone has finished reading the children discuss the unknown words to find the meanings. With our first biography we had to select two adjectives that described our person and record a sentence from the text that reflected that word and justified our answer. Again, in groups, the children shared the two words they had selected and then had decide on one word between them and report back to the class. They are now reading a second biography and we will use this to compare and see if we can find common tratits between the two people we read about. Hope this all makes sense!
