Content Area: Career Education and Consumer, Family, and Life Skills

 

Index: 9.2E Grade 12 CPI 8

 

Standard: 9.2 - Consumer, Family, and Life Skills

 

Strand: E - Consumer and Personal Finance

 

Cumulative Progress Indicator: 8 -  The student will analyze the interrelationships between the economic system and consumer actions in a chosen career cluster.

 

Grade: 12

 

Sample Activities:

 

·        Climatic conditions have changed in the twenty-first century. Research scientists are looking at the oceans to create habitable communities. Create an underwater community.

 

·        Teacher directed interactive discussion about the basic economic principles such as supply, demand, value, price, quantity, complements, substitutes, wants, needs, luxuries, necessities, elasticity, equilibrium, etc. Students will investigate the market system by using the interactive web site at: www.bized.ac.uk/stafsup/options/supply/interactive_markets_1.htm.

 

·        Provide students with a list of economic goods and services. Ask students to divide the items between wants and needs. Further discussion will follow on the difference between wants and needs. Economic systems are either market driven or command economies. Market driven economies meet wants and needs based on demand.  Compare lists of wants.

 

·        Discuss the role of economics in our everyday lives. Economics lesson can easily be found in every supermarket. When you walk through a store, it’s hard to believe that scarcity is a problem. You can’t afford everything you want. (Money is the scarce resource.) What role do prices play in a market economy? What is demand and how does it illustrate the price effect, why do people buy more of something at lower prices and less at higher prices? Make a weekly shopping list based on a given amount of available financial resources. What must you give up in order to purchase something else? What are the opportunity costs and benefits of our decisions?

 

·        Using the school store or a club as an example of a place to make purchases or sales, examine the supply and demand of particular items and discuss the opportunity costs of purchasing one item over another. What affects the buying decisions of consumers?  How does this affect the small store or merchant as far as inventory.

 

·        Discuss supply and demand as related to careers. Discuss occupational trends and the effect of the overall economic system on consumer spending and the effect on various industries. See www.wnjpin.state.nj.us/career_explorer.html, O’Net Online, or Find Occupations link. Students can research various occupations and investigate job forecasts for the future for New Jersey, other states, and individual counties. See www.dol.gov, Occupational Outlook Handbook. Students can look at local classified advertisements to determine the job openings for various career clusters.