Economics PDF

Economics is the eighth unit in the People & Place geography course. In the first half of Economics you will learn about free market principles that make countries wealthy and in the second half you will learn about personal finance and how to have a prosperous life.

By the time you complete the entire four year cycle of Layers of Learning Geography you will have covered the entire world and learned the skills and knowledge needed to analyze and understand maps, cultures, people, governments, and the planet all over the world.

This unit is a guide for the mentor to use in creating lessons and directing discussions and learning. It is not a textbook for the student.

This unit includes sections on:

• Economic Principles
• Personal Finance

Hands-on Learning

This is an activity based curriculum. You pick activities to do as you read books and watch videos about Government. Here are some of the activities found in this unit:

• Plan a birthday party as you learn about scarcity
• Hold a class cupcake auction to observe human economic behavior including trade-offs, opportunity cost, marginal benefits, and incentives
• Make a little village of shops, each sporting one the five free market fundamentals: private property, choice, competition, profit motive, and limited government
• Run your own family business and earn real money with learning about the profit motive
• Make pizza as you learn about the invisible hand by brain storming how your pizza came to be in a free market
• Learn the five personal prosperity principles when you color, cut, and paste a foldable into your World Explorer Journal
• Read the Three Little Pigs and learn how debt, or playing now and paying later, can result in pain
• Learn about credit and borrowing, when to do it and when not to, and solve loan scenarios with a calculator
• Create a notebooking page on investments and start investing now in the real stock market using real money
• Plus much more!

See Inside

This is double page spread of the inside of the Economics unit:

Each Layers of Learning Geography unit includes library lists of books, a family read-aloud suggestion, hands-on activities, printables and paper crafts, sidebars for extra learning, and tools to help you assess student’s progress and mastery. Learn more about how Layers of Learning works.

Flexibility

This unit was written to be used for a month but contains plenty of content for many more weeks of learning if you choose. This is a pick-and-choose curriculum, meant to be cycled back to in the future when your child is older. As such, it intentionally includes far more material than you can possibly cover in a month.

Economics is also part of the overall People & Place course, the fourth Year of the four-year Layers of Learning Geography cycle. If you use the program in order, it will take you though the geography of the world from continents and the physical planet in Year One, to mapping skills in Year Two, then to cultures in Year Three, and finally, to government and society in Year Four.  Every year is also a tour of the whole planet, making stops on every continent. However, each unit stands alone and can be used independently of any other unit.

Printable Pack

This unit comes with a downloadable Printable Pack that includes all the student worksheets. The printables can be copied as many times as needed for your family or class.

 

You can download the Printable Pack from your receipt or from your account at Layers of Learning.

Extra Resources

This unit comes with extra weblinks and a YouTube video playlist on the People & Place Resources page.