Young Entrepreneurs

We recently finished our economics unit in social studies. I had a lot of interested little entrepreneurs who craved information about the world of business and economics. We had a lot of fun with this unit and learned a ton! We learned about opportunity cost through ice cream and cake. We learned about human, natural, and capital resources through creating our own S'more business. We put all of our learning together in our business plan project in which the students developed a business plan from a big idea they had. (We might have the next Shark Tank finalist in our midst.)

We really liked the opportunity cost activity in our classroom. In all learning that we do, I try to relate what I am teaching students with real-life examples they understand. I was pretty sure that my students would understand ice cream and cake (I do!), so I used that as the examples in our opportunity cost activity. I am positive I had students engaged in learning with the mention of ice cream...and I am positive I had most students drooling by mentioning cake. For this lesson, I started with a share aloud to get the students thinking about choices they make in their daily lives even as kids. I asked the students that if they had to choose between spending a day with their family at the beach or going to the movie theater with friends, which would they choose and why? Amazingly, many students chose going to the beach with their family citing reasons such as spending family time together and having a picnic. (Insert awwww here) Then I followed with a close reading passage that introduced the idea of opportunity cost. Next we put our learning to the test by creating opportunity cost flip books. Students were asked to draw an illustration of ice cream and cake on the front of the flaps. Then they wrote the advantages and opportunity cost for choosing each item. These made me chuckle, so we had to share them in our small groups. Our group leaders made sure that everyone had a voice in the group and had a chance to share their flip books. I posted some pics of one of the flip books a student created. Our learning objectives were met with ice cream and cake! Who knew?!