My partner Emilia and I are teaching a first grade economics unit. The focus will be on: goods and services, buyers and sellers, making choices and saving money. Although Emilia and I completed our planning together, we decided to split up the actual teaching of our unit. I taught today’s lesson on needs vs. wants, and Emilia will be teaching tomorrow’s lesson. Identifying the difference between basic needs (food, clothing, shelter) and wants (things people would like to have) is an SOL that the students should have mastered in Kindergarten. However, after administering the Pre-assessment, we discovered that our first graders still did not possess a solid understanding of theses two concepts. This assessment of prior knowledge definitely influenced our instruction. We decided that the first lesson of our unit should be more of a refresher, with a few new concepts such as buyers and goods introduced as well.
The first grade students in our class have a very difficult time staying focused and on task. For our lesson, we took this into consideration by attempting to minimize the amount of time that the students were being lectured. We tried to create activities that would keep them involved and hold their attention. After a short direct instruction lesson on the differences between needs and wants, the students participated in an interactive game. Going one by one in a circle, the students were asked to respond to these questions: “What is something you need?” and “What is something you want?” The goal of this activity was for the students to recognize that their list of needs (things they had to have to survive) was much shorter than their list of wants (which could potentially go on forever).
This gave an opportunity for all of the students in the class to make a contribution. It forced them to think about the idea they were going to share with their peers. It also required them to listen carefully to their classmates responses (so as not to repeat an answer). I feel that this activity was beneficial because it obligated the students to construct their own responses and draw their own conclusions (versus simply being fed information from the teacher). In addition, our first graders often have problems talking out of turn. Consequently, during this activity, I decided to designate a little teddy bear as the magic key to being able to speak and contribute to the discussion. To avoid disruptions and help the activity run smoothly, I told the students that only the person holding the teddy bear was the allowed to talk.
The formative assessment for this lesson was a picture sort that was collected at the end. The students cut out and arranged by category eight different pictures of needs and wants. While circulating the classroom during the picture sorts, it appeared that most students had understood the lesson and grasped the important concepts. However, it is important to note that this activity contained selected response items. It would have been interesting to see if students exhibited the same level of mastery if we had given them constructed response questions instead.
In our planning, we also made sure to consider the student’s diverse needs and varying ability levels. We anticipated some students taking more time to complete their picture sorts while knowing others would finish quickly. If students finished with the sort before their peers, they were asked to flip their papers over and expand on the list of needs and wants using words and pictures.
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