Special Features

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• Students will be introduced to the concepts of community in relation to how jobs and businesses work interdependently. Through an identification game, students will grasp and begin to analyze the wide variety of jobs and their importance to a functioning community.

• Social Studies Standards 4 (Economics): SWBAT use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of how the United States and other societies develop economic systems and associated institutions to allocate scarce resources, how major decision-making units function in the U.S. and other national economies, and how an economy solves the scarcity problem through market and non-market mechanisms.

• Students will be able to understand, demonstrate, and critique their own communities as functioning, interdependent, and successful network.
  
• Students will be able to understand, visualize, and analyze the government involvement in communities, production, and the networking of money.
  
• Students will comprehend, interpret, and reconstruct the purpose of money and its value to the success of a community and nation.
  
• Students will be able to comprehend, reconstruct and analyze the need of fast and efficient production of goods as in relation to supply and demand.

• Recognize a variety of jobs within a community and identify social interaction between different people of a community by becoming aware and familiar with the wide variety of job opportunities and their importance to the success of a community through a grand discussion and identification activity.

• 2 white poster boards
  
• Enlarged picture of the community
  
• Interview of a Family Member

1. Focusing Activity:
   • Teacher introduces SIFE Stash and explains the rules of gaining and deducting money through classroom jobs, completed homework, disciplinary issues, attendance, etc. and briefly introduces the Auction that will be held on the last class of the Unit (Friday).
     
   • Teacher begins lesson with two posters displaying the words 'Community' on one and 'Job' on the other.
     
   • The teacher questions the students on their definitions of each word, writing their ideas below the topic word.
     
   • After the class finds a collective definition, the teacher will ask the students what they believe is/are the relationship(s) between the two terms.
     
   • Leave these posters up to refer back to at the end of class.
   
   
2. Instructional Strategies:
   • Looking at the enlarged poster of the community ask students the following questions:
     • What is this person doing?
       
     • Why is this person necessary in the community?
       
     • Do you know anyone that performs this job?
       
     • Would you want to do this job?
       
     • What do you think are these people's responsibilities?
   • Show Picture of Pizza Shop and ask students to identify what all the different jobs are in the pizza shop?
     • What do these people have to do each day?
       
     • What types of things do they need to know how to do?
   
   
3. Guided Practice:
   • Have students list jobs and businesses in their community at home (i.e. their neighborhood, block, or town)
     
   • Make a network of the interaction between the different jobs and businesses just as depicted in the hypothetical community.
     
   • Have the students take away one of the members of the community and have them demonstrate how different the interaction within the community would be.
   
   
4. Closure:
   • Have students participate in a grand discussion about the importance of every job and business in a community, including their own. Bring up topics of the absence of one member of a community and if the community could still function, or what negative effect it would have on the community.
     
   • Go back the definitions of community and job, discuss any other ideas to their relationship and make adjustments to the definitions.

Students will be assessed on the completion and comprehension demonstrated in:


• A short response to their ideas and definitions of community, jobs, and how they work together to create a successful and functioning network.
  
• Conducting the "Interview of a Family Member" to turn in the next class, along with a response to their family members role in your own community.

SIFE (Students In Free Enterprise) is a global partnership between business and higher education with over 1400 active programs in 48 countries.