This semester, the Year 5s have been learning about Economics. There have been three main tasks in our learning.

The first step was learning about Economics in general. We created a yellow booklet full of paper folds with definitions. These words gave us a good understanding of some key words to support us as we began our investigation into the world of Economics. Some examples of these words are: imports and exports, producer and consumer, needs and wants, the characteristics of money, trade and barter.

The next task was to select a country and research the following questions; Who does your country trade with? What goods and services does your country import/export? What natural resources are available to your country? Where does your country rank with GDP (Gross Domestic Product)? There were a lot of questions that required plenty of research. We prepared a presentation using PowerPoint and shared our learning. This meant we learnt about lots of different countries’ economies. Of course, we needed a bibliography and reference list to keep track of our research!

The last part of this introduction to Economics was the “My Mini Economy” project. We were supposed to play the Trading Game but for reasons you may know, with COVID-19 our teachers had to make some necessary changes. We were given a budget of one million dollars and we had to calculate our spending to make our own little city. We carefully budgeted for the amenities that are essential in a town, such as hospitals, water treatment plants, power plants, factories, shops, police and fire stations and of course, houses! Then using cardboard boxes, resources from home and paper, we made all kinds of 3D shapes from their nets and stuck them on our carefully designed town base. This challenged our thinking and it was certainly not “smooth sailing” for everyone. Luckily, we kept our focus, helped each other and created some incredible, brilliant and liveable town designs. The final step is to create an advertisement for our town.

Here are some pictures of some of the final creations.