The law of supply and demand states that the price of an item or service moves directly in accordance with both the number of people that are interested in acquiring that service, and inversely with how widely available the item or service is. When teaching supply and demand to children, grand scale explanations are often too difficult for them to grasp. Instead, putting the concept into terms they understand and offering hands-on demonstrations will help the children to better understand how supply and demand works.
Difficulty: Moderate
Instructions
Things You'll Need Play money Bag of small candies Large candy
1)Explain the concept to the children in basic terms before beginning demonstrations, telling the students that when a lot of people want something that is rare the price is very high, while things that are common and not as popular sell for much cheaper.
2)Give a basic example of supply and demand that the children can understand. For example, discuss the fact that when a local band plays a concert, tickets are easy to acquire; however, when a popular pop star plays, he has far more people that want to attend than there are seats for them -- so tickets are more expensive.
3)Distribute an even amount of play money to every student in the class. Ten bills works well.
4)Present a bag of small candies, such as M&Ms or Skittles, and explain that you will be selling the small candies to the highest offers in the class. As there are more candies in the bag than students in the class, possibly even more than there are bills of play money, students will not need to pay very much to buy a candy with their play money.
5)Offer a larger candy, preferably one which can be divided such as a chocolate bar, to the class. With only one bar available for the whole class to try to buy, the price will be much higher, possibly even requiring children to pool money to buy it.
6)Allow the children to play online games about Supply and Demand, such as the lemonade stand game in Resources indicated below.
Tips & Warnings
After teaching the lesson and allowing children to see the difference supply and demand has on price, divide the candy evenly among students to ensure everyone gets some, if you are using play money given only for the purpose of the demonstration. Alternatively, the lesson can be worked into a pre-existing rewards program in the class, with students allowed to make offers using reward money they have earned for good performance or good behavior in the class, in which case the winning bidders can keep the candy as their reward.
No comments:
Post a Comment