If you are a Florida Educator, I have created short teacher prompts (think aloud questions) for you to use to elaborate on the Next Generation Sunshine State Standards for Economics K-3 using The Lorax by Dr. Seuss.

Kindergarten

Standard SS.K.E.1.1

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Describe different kinds of jobs that people do and the tools or equipment used. Teacher Prompt: What are the different types of jobs you see people doing in the book/movie? What tools and equipment do they use?

Standard SS.K.E.1.3

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Recognize that people work to earn money to buy things they need or want. Teacher Prompt: How do you think people work to earn money to buy Thneeds in The Lorax? Are Thneeds something people need or want?

Standard SS.K.E.1.4

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Identify the difference between basic needs and wants. Teacher Prompt: Does anyone need a Thneed? Why did they need Thneeds? The difference between basic needs and wants is that needs are things required for health and survival (food, clothing, shelter). What basic needs were scarce because of the making of Thneeds?

First Grade

Standard SS.1.E.1.2

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Define opportunity costs as giving up one thing for another. Teacher Prompt: The opportunity cost is the next best choice you could have made. For example, imagine the Once-ler had two choices: use all the trees or plant a seed for each tree used. The Once-ler decided to use all the trees so the opportunity cost would be the next best choice he could have made: to plant a seed for each tree used. What do you think would have happened if he would have replaced the trees by planting seeds?

Standard SS.1.E.1.4

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Distinguish people as buyers, sellers, and producers of goods and services. Teacher Prompt: Think about the Thneeds in the story? Who are the buyers of Thneeds? Who are the sellers of Thneeds? Who are the producers of the Thneeds?

Standard SS.1.E.1.6Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Identify that people need to make choices because of scarce resources. Teacher Prompt: How would the story change if the Once-ler would have replaced the scarce resources (trees) by replanting seeds?

Second Grade

standard SS.2.E.1.1

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Recognize that people make choices because of limited resources. Teacher Prompt: What decision did the Once-ler make because of the limited resources of Truffula Trees? What other choices could he have made?

Standard SS.2.E.1.2

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Recognize that people supply goods and services based on consumer demands. Teacher Prompt: What would happen if nobody wanted to buy Thneeds?

Standard SS.3.E.1.1

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Give examples of how scarcity results in trade. Teacher Prompt: How would the story change if the Once-ler found someone with whom he could trade to obtain more trees?

Standard SS.3.E.1.3

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Recognize that buyers and sellers interact to exchange goods and services through the use of trade or money. Teacher Prompt: Think about the Thneeds in the story? Who are the buyers of Thneeds? Who are the sellers of Thneeds? Who are the producers of the Thneeds? How did people buy the Thneeds?

Lemonade Economics: Teacher prompts for NGSSS for Social Studies: Economics

Kindergarten

Standard SS.K.E.1.1

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Describe different kinds of jobs that people do and the tools or equipment used. Teacher Prompt: Examine the different lemonade stories (fiction and non-fiction) and think of the different jobs people might do in: 1) a lemonade stand; 2) a lemon grove; and, 3) making lemonade in a factory. Make lemonade in the classroom. What tools and equipment do you need? What types of jobs do people need to do to make lemonade?

Standard SS.K.E.1.2

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Recognize that United States currency comes in different forms. Teacher Prompt: What if a glass of lemonade cost $1.00. How could you pay for it? (teacher puts out a dollar bill, a dollar coin, and other combinations of coins if she thinks students are ready to count 100 pennies, count by 10’s to 100, etc.)

Standard SS.K.E.1.3

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Recognize that people work to earn money to buy things they need or want. Teacher Prompt: Read Lemonade for Sale and have students to discuss how the kids made money in the story. Why did the students produce and sell lemonade (to raise money for their clubhouse). Then ask them to imagine they have their own stand. What would they want to buy with the money they made? Branch the discussion out to other jobs. Relate this to Arthur’s Pet Business (the video and online readings were included in the workshop CD).

Standard SS.K.E.1.4

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Identify the difference between basic needs and wants. Teacher Prompt: Do the children need the clubhouse? The difference between basic needs and wants is that needs are things required for health and survival (food, clothing, shelter). Even though the children don’t “need” the clubhouse, they wanted a clubhouse because it was important for their club so they made a choice to work to raise money.

First Grade

standard SS.1.E.1.1

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Recognize that money is a method of exchanging goods and services. Teacher Prompt: What did they customers use to buy the lemonade from the children? They traded money for a good (lemonade).

Standard SS.1.E.1.2

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Define opportunity costs as giving up one thing for another. Teacher Prompt: The opportunity cost is the next best choice you could have made. For example, the children could sell lemonade to raise money for their clubhouse or they could choose to play instead. Because they chose to sell lemonade, they had money for the clubhouse. But they gave up some playtime. On the other hand, if they chose to play, they would not have money for the playhouse (think about the Three Little Pigs-what was the opportunity cost of the Straw and Stick pig not taking the time to build a sturdy house because they wanted to play instead?)

Standard SS.1.E.1.3

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Distinguish between examples of goods and services. Teacher Prompt: Think about a lemonade stand. The lemonade is a good. If someone is pouring lemonade for the customers, she is providing a service. If someone creates an advertisement for the lemonade stand, he is providing a service.

Standard SS.1.E.1.4

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Distinguish people as buyers, sellers, and producers of goods and services. Teacher Prompt: Think about a lemonade stand. Who are the buyers of lemonade? Who are the sellers of lemonade? Who are the producers of the lemonade?

Standard SS.1.E.1.5

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Recognize the importance of saving money for future purchases. Teacher Prompts: Think about the children in Lemonade for Sale. They were saving the money they made for future purchases in the club house. Think about your own life. Have you—or anyone else in your family—ever saved money for a future purchase? What happened?

Standard SS.1.E.1.6

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Identify that people need to make choices because of scarce resources. Teacher Prompt: How would the story change if the children ran low on lemons? Sugar? What kind of choices would the students have to make if lemons or sugar became scarce resources? What would happen if some of the children couldn’t help make or sell the lemonade?

Third Grade

standard SS.2.E.1.1

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Recognize that people make choices because of limited resources. Teacher Prompt: How would the story change if the children ran low on lemons? Sugar? What kind of choices would the students have to make if lemons or sugar became scarce resources? What would happen if some of the children couldn’t help make or sell the lemonade?

Standard SS.2.E.1.2

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Recognize that people supply goods and services based on consumer demands. Teacher Prompt: What would happen if nobody wanted to buy lemonade (no consumer demand)? What would happen if more consumers wanted lemonade? Should the children make more?

Standard SS.2.E.1.4

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Explain the personal benefits and costs involved in saving and spending. Teacher Prompt: What are the personal benefits for the customers buying lemonade? What are the costs? What are the benefits for the children who are selling the lemonade? What are the costs?

Standard SS.3.E.1.1

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Give examples of how scarcity results in trade. Teacher Prompt: How would the story change if the children ran low on lemons? Sugar? What kind of choices would the students have to make if lemons or sugar became scarce resources? Could they trade some of their profits for goods? What if two lemonade stands were working side by side and one was short on lemons and the other was short on sugar. What could they do?

Standard SS.3.E.1.3

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Recognize that buyers and sellers interact to exchange goods and services through the use of trade or money. Teacher Prompt: Think about a lemonade stand. Who are the buyers of lemonade? What do they use to purchase the lemonade? Who are the sellers of lemonade? What do they receive from customers in exchange for lemonade?

Standard SS.3.E.1.4

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Distinguish between currencies used in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Teacher Prompt: Search the Internet for different types of currency. Then ask students how they would pay for a glass of lemonade in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, or Caribbean countries.

Fourth Grade

Review Basic concepts from Third Grade Plus:

standard SS.4.E.1.1

Standard 1: Beginning Economics

• Identify entrepreneurs from various social and ethnic backgrounds who have influenced Florida and local economy. Teacher Prompt: The children in Lemonade Wars, the Warren Buffet Video, and the Lemonade Stand video were all entrepreneurs in the stories. Describe these children. What were their challenges? How did they succeed?

Fifth Grade: Review Third Grade basic concepts plus:

Standard SS.5.E.1.1

Standard 1: Market Economy

• Identify how trade promoted economic growth in North America from pre-Columbian times to 1850. Teacher Prompt: First discuss the concept of trade from today. For example, in the Lemonade Wars discuss how customers trade currency for lemonade and how the sellers trade lemonade for money. Then move back in time to explore other forms of currency from pre-Columbian times and revisit: consumers, producers, and sellers. What did they use for trade? If you didn’t have money, what could you use?

Standard SS.5.E.1.2

Standard 1: Market Economy

• Describe a market economy, and give examples of how the colonial and early American economy exhibited these characteristics. Teacher Prompt: First describe the basics of a market economy as illustrated in the circular flow model: Think of glasses of lemonade as the goods (outputs). Think of the flow of money where consumers spend money to buy goods/services. Money is used in the production and distribution of new resources that consumers can buy. People use resources (inputs) in the production and distribution of goods and services. What are the resources (human, natural, capital) required to make lemonade? (Human=jobs, natural=natural resources, capital=capital goods, tools, equipment). Now think how this would look in a different historical period, prior to the current market economy (that includes money and credit cards)

Standard SS.5.E.1.3

Standard 1: Market Economy

• Trace the development of technology and the impact of major inventions on business productivity during the early development of the United States. Teacher Prompts: Think how different technologies we have today allowed the students to make their lemonade faster than in the past. (frozen lemonade, powdered lemonade drink mix, bottled water, tap water, lemons transported to supermarkets, lemon juicers, etc.)

Before Reading: Discuss wants and needs. Is a cupcake a need? What other foods are needs?

After Reading: Discuss the difference between needs and wants. We want many things, but there are some things that we need to survive or keep us healthy: food, shelter, clothing, medicine. Cupcakes are a food, but are they a food we need for health or are they an extra food? Extras are wants but not necessarily needs.  Play the Brain Pop Game about needs and wants with the students together or have them use the game individually on computers.  Here are some yummy cupcake recipes!

Here are some extra activities to use with the book!

Brain Pop Needs/Wants activity.

Goods and Services drag and drop activity from EconEdLink.

There are some excellent children’s books available to teach economics through the real-life activity of a lemonade stand. Use these books to provide a context for learning the economic concepts of operating a lemonade stand.

Then, use the EconEdLink Lesson plan The Lemonade Squeeze. In this lesson, students read “The Lemon Story” to learn where lemons come from. They also put on a play and discuss economic concepts about having a lemonade stand. They also learn elementary economic concepts–

Choice, Consumers, Demand, Price, Producers, Scarcity, Supply

–and play The Lemonade Stand Game in the lesson Not Your Grandma’s Lemonade Stand.

After they use the lesson, they can read the online book Make and $ell Fresh Lemonade by Sunkist…who also provides lemonade stand tips!

How many of you have seen this Lemonade commercial from Verizon?

Think of the commercial in terms of the 6 Core Economic Principles.

1. People choose. We always want more than we can get and productive resources are scarce. How does Suzy get human, natural, and capital resources for her lemonade empire?
2. All choices involve costs. An opportunity cost is the next best alternative you give up when you make a choice. Suzy makes the choice to go big with her lemonade stand. When she chose to go corporate, she refused something else…
3. People respond to incentives. Did incentives change in the commercial? How did people respond?
4. Economic systems influence individual choices and incentives. When her dad gave her the phone, he introduced a good that helped change the economic system from a roadside lemonade stand. What were the changes in the system as compared to a regular lemonade stand?
5. Voluntary trade creates wealth. What were the different types of specializations  of goods and services that helped Suzy’s lemonade empire?
6. The consequences of choices lie in the future. What were the consequences for Suzy’s dad? What were other unexpected consequences–good and bad?

DURING READING: When she hears this fundraiser involves selling cupcakes, she is all ears (p. 25)!  Then she hears the top fundraiser will receive a prize. Thoughts of this prize become an incentive for Babymouse. From p. 26 on, Babymouse encounters a variety of challenges in trying to sell the most cupcakes. First of all, once school is let out (p. 28) the students all race out to sell cupcakes. By the time Babymouse gets home (p. 30) another student has already hit her house! Babymouse has a problem. There are too many kids selling in the neighborhood! Customers are a scarce resource! So she devises some plans to find customers in other ways…

p. 31 At dinner, Babymouse’s family members suggest she try selling to relatives. Have you ever tried to sell fundraisers to family members? What happened? What happens to Babymouse? Why is she having problems? Is there enough demand for the cupcakes from her relatives?

p. 37 What happens when Babymouse hears Felicia has already sold a hundred cupcakes? How does she feel?

p. 45-46 Babymouse sees that Felicia is advertising. She sees that Felicia has a good slogan, so she makes up her own advertising poster.

AFTER READING: Have students visit the ReadWriteThink Printing Press interactive, so they can create a brochure or flyer to help Babymouse advertise her cupcakes.

Before Reading: Discuss the ingredients necessary to make cupcakes. What goods would you need to buy in order to make cupcakes? When goods like a bag of flour or sugar are used to make cupcakes, these are known as intermediate goods. Discuss the concept of a bake sale. Have you been to a bake sale? Who provides the goods to sell–the baked goods? Who provides the services–the selling and packaging? How does a bake sale produce money for the school library? Do the workers or producers get paid for their services?

During Reading: During reading, there are spaces in the book that are perfect opportunities for discussing these concepts.

Cover: Fancy Nancy is making cupcakes. What goods do you need to buy at the supermarket to make cupcakes? Look at the picture. What are some of the resources she is using?

P. 6: There is a bake sale at school the next day. The bake sale is to raise money for library books. How does that work? How does the school make money from the bake sale? (People donate goods and services)

P. 12: At the market, what are the goods Nancy’s mom buys? These goods will be used to make other goods–cupcakes–so they are called intermediate goods. What are the natural resources that were used to create these goods? (sugar cane, wheat, etc.)

P. 13-15: Capital resources are the tools used to make the cupcakes. What tools are used? Human resources are the people who help make the cupcakes. Who are the human resources and what jobs are they doing?

P. 19: Nancy is making a deal with a friend to exchange two brownies for two cupcakes. Does that make money for the school library? How does that exchange benefit both Nancy and her friend? Nancy will exchange some cupcakes for other goods. She will also sell cupcakes in exchange for currency-money.

P. 25: After Nancy’s disaster where the dog eats the cupcakes, her father also brought home some “stuff” or resources to make cupcakes. What goods did he have in his bag? Were these the same goods mom bought? Anything different? Do you remember what you call goods that are used to make another product? That’s right! Intermediate goods. They are in the middle of being goods themselves (flour, sugar, etc.) and being made into another product (a cupcake).

P. 27: Check out the baking. What jobs were people doing on pages 25-27 in order to make cupcakes? What equipment (capital resources) or tools did they use? Was there anything different from the tools on pages 13-15?

P. 29-30: Finally! The bake sale. Who are the buyers? Who are the sellers? What are all of the goods for sale? How do you think people paid for the baked goods? Where do you think they stored the money?

After Reading: After you finish reading, review the economics concepts/ vocabulary words that you discussed in the read/aloud think/aloud questions and comments.

For the first discussion, I’d like to focus on the book Hello Cupcake, by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson. Rather than fiction, I have chosen this non-fiction recipe book to begin. You can find many interesting cupcake ideas on the Hello Cupcake website.

Cupcakes are great to eat, Yum, but they are also great beginnings to use to talk about economics concepts. For example:

1. What are the productive resources needed to make cupcakes? Let’s start with ingredients. Pinky Pie (from My Little Pony) can help us with some of these in this delightful little video: Pinky-Pie’s Cupcake Song. Ingredients can be considered intermediate goods in creating the final cupcake good. What intermediate goods are mentioned in the song? What intermediate goods are mentioned in your favorite cupcake recipe?
2. Now think of those ingredients. What are the natural resources necessary to create those goods? For example, where does flour come from? How do we get sugar? Where do we get vanilla? Or chocolate? These are all questions that can lead to the natural resources.
3. Now think of the capital resources necessary to make those cupcakes. What tools and equipment do you use when baking. Pinky Pie can show you a few things–bowls, mixers, wooden spoons–but what other capital resources can you think of?
4. Now comes the human resources or human capital. What human resources are necessary to make cupcakes? This is different in your home than in a factory. For example, watch this series of Khan Academy Cupcake Economics videos to understand the complex economics of creating cupcakes in a factory:

• Economics of  a Cupcake Factory
• Cupcake Economics 2: More Analysis of the Cupcake Business
• Cupcake Economics 3 : Using our spreadsheet to show why prices decrease when utilization is low and prices

I recommend you read the book aloud first to set a context for learning. Then, use the following questions/comments to develop a discussion about economic concepts–Econ-cepts. Visit the EconEdLink Glossary for definitions of the Econ-cepts.

Cover: If you wanted to eat a pancake at home, what would you you need (see wants)? (Before Reading)

Page 1-2: If you wanted pancakes for breakfast, are your choices? (use decision tree/chart–see the last post How Do You Hug a Porcupine for a sample Decision Tree.

Pages 3-4: What was Jack’s decision? What resources (tools, goods) does his mother need for pancakes? She needs flour-it is a scarce resource.  I wonder how Jack will decide to get flour. What would you do?

Page 5-6: What does Jack decide to do? If Jack has two choices–get flour or don’t get flour–what is his opportunity cost if he decides to get the flour? What is his opportunity cost if he decides not to get the flour? Remember opportunity cost is the next best alternative you give up when you make a choice between alternatives.

Page 5-10: Watch for the productive resources (human, capital, natural) used for flour. What are the tools, jobs, goods, and services?

Page 12:  What a lot of work! What is Jack’s incentive to keep going? He wants pancakes!

Pages 12-16: Let’s look at the division of labor. Who does what job with what tool? OR What are the human, capital, and natural resources?

Pages 17-18: Jack’s mom mentions a topping for pancakes. What decisions do you have to put on your pancakes? Let’s think of three items—maple syrup, butter, and jam. If I can’t decide between maple syrup and jam, but then choose the jam, then maple syrup is my next best choice. The next best choice is my opportunity cost of choosing the other alternative.

Page 19-28 On the next few pages, lets see what productive, human, and capital resources are needed to make pancakes? Note: for younger children you may want to ask what are the goods, services, jobs, and tools. Record these as students list them. Or they can record these and create a digital book with images and text. See the Technology Tips section of this website for more information on how to create digital responses.

For more ideas on using Pancakes Pancakes to teach Economics, view:

Lesson ideas focusing on productive resources: Kids Econ Posters

Lesson developed by the Maryland Council on Economic Education