Add a Curriculum Bundle to Your Account!
Please select a bundle.
The Pack contains associated resources for the learning experience, typically in the form of articles and videos. There is a teacher Pack (with only teacher information) and a student Pack (which contains only student information). As a teacher, you can toggle between both to see everything.
Here are the teacher pack items for Measuring the Economy:
Overview
In this experience, students identify how economists use leading, lagging, and coincident indicators to make predictions about the health of the economy. Then they evaluate a specific economic indicator and how it changed over a given reporting period. Finally, students write a letter to a clothing company CEO to make predictions about the health of the economy based on the consumer confidence index. Note that the GDP was covered in the experience “Capitalism and Free Enterprise.” Objective
The economy is a dynamic system that has its ups and downs. Economists who study the U.S. economy talk about its health, as if it were a living organism. In this lesson, you will learn about some of the signs that indicate the status of the economy.
Objective
Good news! Your best friend just won tickets to see a new movie. You have been waiting months for its release. Now you and your friend have free tickets! The only problem is that the movie starts at 9:00pm…on a school night. You are hoping that your parents will give you permission to go and give you and your friend a ride.
You wait anxiously as the afternoon goes by. You finish your homework, pack your lunch for the next day, and straighten up your room. You hear the door unlock and your parents walk in, talking about their workday. Your mother tosses her bag on the table, sighs heavily, and plops down into a chair. Your father starts to look through the kitchen cabinets, asking for something quick and simple for dinner. You see that your mother looks exhausted as she turns to you and asks about your day.What do you do? Should you bring up the subject of the movie tickets now?
Ask for student volunteers to explain why they chose their responses.
You may have paid attention to the clues your parents’ behavior gave you before you decided to tell them about the movie tickets. These signs—the sighing, you mother slumping in the chair, your father looking for something simple to eat—acted as indicators. Indicators are signs of the state of something. In this example, the indicators were signs that your parents were tired and hungry, and maybe not ready to think about the movie right now!
