Lesson 1 Part 4

Reteach

Your teacher will ask some of the students to be storekeepers and some of the students to be buyers. The storekeepers will have pictures or empty boxes of goods and pictures of services. The teacher will line the buyers up to visit the shopkeepers. Each buyer will have one ticket. If a ticket has the words One good, the buyer must pick out a box or picture of a good. If a ticket has the words One service, the buyer must pick out a picture of a service. The storekeepers will make sure that the buyers pick only one product and pick from the correct type. Storekeepers should be ready to answer questions about why you thought that products were goods or services. Buyers should be ready to answer questions about how you chose your products.

Enrichment

Economists (i-kon' e-mists) are people whose job it is to study economics. Economists assume two things about economic behavior. One thing is that a person's economic wants are insatiable (in-sa' she-bel). Insatiability (in-sa' she-bil-i-te) means that economic wants are impossible to satisfy. People who are somehow able to buy everything they want will just want even more things. People can never have enough goods and services.

But remember that people have to trade something to get goods and services. We will discuss trading later in this book. For now, let us say that resources (re' sors' es) are what people trade to get goods and services. The other thing that economists assume is that resources are scarce (skars). Scarcity (skar' si-te) means that there is a limit to how many resources are available to trade for meeting economic wants. As a matter of fact, there are not enough resources to trade for meeting all the insatiable economic wants. Therefore, people can have some of their wants and cannot have others of their wants. That means that people must make choices about which wants to have and which wants to give up. How people make these choices is what economists study.
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Teacher's Notes

Reteach

If student performance on Independent Practice is unsatisfactory, use the Reteach activity. In addition, you may choose to use Reteach if your students best learn kinesthetically. Choose about 20 goods and 20 services to offer in your store. For the goods, bring in pictures or empty boxes. For the services, bring in pictures. Make 20 tickets that read, "One good" and 20 tickets that read, "One service." Choose one half of your students to be storekeepers. The other half will be buyers. Give one ticket to each buyer. Follow the instructions described in the text. From time to time, stop the activity and ask storekeeper volunteers how they distinguished between goods and services. Ask buyer volunteers how they chose products, especially given that they can choose only one product. The key lessons are that buyers must make choices and that there is a difference between goods and services.

Enrichment

Use Enrichment for more advanced students. Students will learn vocabulary terms associated with National Voluntary Standards for older grades. This lesson introduces the terms economists, insatiability, resources, and scarcity. Explain to students that the latter three concepts interact to force people to make choices. People in general have insatiable, unlimited, infinite economic wants. People must trade resources such as money, labor, or time to obtrain economic wants. Resources, however, are scarce, limited, finite. Therefore, people can satisfy only limited sets of their infinite economic wants. This limitation forces people to choose which economics wants are most important to obtain and how to expend their resources. This process of choosing is what economists study.
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