Real World Economics

Saving for the Future...
After working on the large activity of learning a foreign language, I was worried about how big in scope each groups’ Learning activity would be. Luckily, the following group created a very meaningful and relevant activity for us to learn about real world economics.

Their group assigned each student a profession and a salary. We all had the common background that we were all single and no children. We were then to figure out a savings plan for ourselves in light of our current US economic situation considering rent, insurance, utilities, grocery, etc…. This assignment was interesting in many ways because we all had ot step out of our lives and consider what it would be like to be another individual earning either more or less than we do now. The activity asked for us to learn Budgetpulse and create charts that demonstrated what we would spend and what we would save. We used these charts for a discussion that followed.
I enjoyed this activity a lot and thought the relevancy for today’s adults and youth was quite meaningful. We could all learn, especially with the numerous software applications available, to budget appropriately and learn the power of saving. Additionally, the follow up questions that were asked created a nice discussion for us to examine our current practices in spite of what we learned.

Finally, the group concluded with a survey asking about the connections between their essential learnings and the activity itself. I was really impressed with the overall plan of their lesson, the execution, the follow-up discussion and the survey.