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1. Action Step #1: Training, It's Good for You
   • Where to Find Training
2. Action Step #2: Get (Even More) Comfortable with Economics
   • Teach the World Around You
3. Action Step #3: If You Buy One Resource, Make It Virtual Economics
   • Activity-based Lessons, From Planning to Delivery
4. Action Step #4: Leverage the Grades 6-8 Economics Package
   • Your Students Learn by Doing
5. Action Step #5: Infuse Economics Into Other Subject Areas
   • Teach More Content, With Less Work
6. Action Step #6: Avoid the Financial Mistakes of the Past
   • Start with the Basics
7. Action Step #7: Grab Some Face Time in the Computer Lab
   • Find Free Lessons at EconEdLink.org

Resource: The Great Economic Mysteries Book: A Guide to Teaching Economic Reasoning, Grades 4-8

Background Reading: The Handy Dandy Guide to Economic Reasoning

Sample Lesson: The Mystery of the Greedy Teenagers

What It Does: Uses a labor and employment mystery -- babysitting -- to introduce students to economic reasoning.

What Makes It Unique: Your students work together in groups to analyze data, discuss alternatives and defend answers to common, everyday mysteries; you're introducing them to economics, in a fun context.

• teach 51 economic and personal finance concepts
• build your vocabulary (which you can also use with your students)
• find activity-based lesson plans to demonstrate the concepts to your students
• correlate lessons to your state economic standards

Resource: Virtual Economics CD-ROM

Video Demonstration: How a teacher uses Virtual Economics for lesson planning -- Watch Video

What It Does: Virtual Economics helps you plan, find and deliver economic or personal finance lessons.

What Makes It Unique: You use technology to build your economic and personal finance knowledge base, and search a database of lesson plans by keyword, publication and state content standard.

What if you used activity-based lesson plans, simulations and group projects to increase student participation in your classroom? Chances are, your students would pick up the concepts quite a bit faster.

The Grades 6-8 Economics Package is the easiest, most affordable way to add economics to your curriculum. Best of all, you'll give your middle school students a basic foundation in the terminology and principles they will need to succeed in their high school courses... and in life.

You'll harness the power of three popular print-based programs:

Here's something that's fun and easy to try: start teaching basic economic concepts with hands-on activities and role-playing exercises.

Your students will learn best by doing, right? And it takes some of the instructional burden off you, at the same time.

So, have them roll up their sleeves and jump start their economics learning with Play Dough.

Have your students create Play Dough products to sell and trade in the classroom. Watch while your students sculpt Play Dough baseball bats, Play Dough baseballs, Play Dough hats and Play Dough flowers... the possibilities are endless.

What else are they doing? They're thinking like producers, like entrepreneurs.

Next, have them walk around the classroom and purchase items from their fellow classmates (with play money, of course); you've just helped them understand their roles as consumers.

See how easy that was? And your students just mastered important concepts like production, opportunity cost, scarcity and natural resources.

A perfect guide for getting started with hands-on economic fun is Play Dough Economics. These activity-based lessons are correlated to National Content Standards and are a way to seamlessly adds economics principles to your everyday instruction.

You'll also find literature connections that reinforce concepts and strengthen your students language arts skills. Helpful pre-tests and post tests will help your students "Play" on track.

Teaching Tip: Teach Economics with the Ultimate Hands-on Activities

So now that your students rolled up their sleeves and have an understanding of basic economic concepts, how do they apply these principles to the real-world?

Challenge your students to take an in-depth look at economics with activities, simulations and projects from Focus: Middle School Economics.

This helpful teacher guide explores the 6 roles your students will play in the economy (producers, consumers, workers, etc.). It shows them how to make decisions and choices, and infuses advanced concepts like supply and demand, trade barriers, and GDP into your instruction. Students even track their learning progress in a journal.

Teaching Tip: Activity-based Lessons Make Your Life A Whole Lot Easier

After you've prepared your students for real-world decision-making, take them outside of the classroom and on a journey around the globe. (Don't worry, you won't actually be leaving your classroom...)

With an increasingly interdependent economy, it's important to understand how trade figures into the products we purchase and own.

Take a sweet and chocolatey Hershey Kiss: where does it come from? Your first instinct is probably "good ol' Hersey, Pennsylvania," but the Hershey Kiss is really a product of global exchange.

The Hershey Corporation trades goods from all around the world to produce just one Hershey Kiss. The cocoa beans come from tropical regions; the sugar comes from plantations in Cuba; and the aluminum comes from countries like Canada, China, Japan and even the US.

This is just one of the action-packed lesson plans you'll find in Wide World of Trade. You'll not only give your students a global economics perspective, you'll also reinforce important skills like teamwork, problem solving and critical thinking.

You'd like to teach economics, but maybe you're wondering how you can fit it into your required courses.

A strong knowledge of economic concepts will help students become better decision-makers, giving them the ability to tackle tough decisions as business owners, consumers and producers.

But can this economic foundation also help them save our environment?

Explore hot-button environmental issues in your classroom with an easy-to-understand teacher guide like Economics and the Environment: Ecodetectives. This resource is packed with mystery-based lesson plans and activities that give your students a whole new perspective on the environment around them.

Teaching Tip: Use Economics to Explore the Environment

Beat the time crunch during the year and combine two important subject areas into one: give your students a solid understanding of economics through mathematics problems and equations.

Create a math and economics curriculum with Mathematics and Economics: Grades 6-8. This lesson plan teacher guide applies mathematical problem solving in the context of economics, using real-world scenarios.

Teaching Tip: Why Do Twice the Work? Combine Multiple Disciplines Into One Lesson
You're probably wondering at this point... how many other subjects can possibly involve economics? Well read on, because geography is no longer just about "where is the Sahara Desert, and what is its climate and vegetation?"

Next time you look at a map, make sure the first thing your students see is economics.

After all, resources, climate and location are essential to understanding the economy. Geography establishes a location's resources, which in turn dictates what goods and services are produced.

Geography also plays a role in why people move, and how the different rules and laws of each region affect economic freedom.

Use Focus: Middle School World Geography to sprinkle your geography curriculum with economics. This helpful classroom guide is filled with reproducible maps, data, charts, graphs, tables, documents and more.

Teaching Tip: There's More to Geography than a Map

It's never too early to start teaching key personal finance skills. When your students learn personal finance skills at an early age, they are more likely to understand concepts quicker; learn healthy spending and saving habits from the get-go; and prepare for a sustainable financial future.

Financial Fitness for Life is a complete personal finance program that covers:

You can use the program to pick-and-choose select lessons, or you can use all the lessons as a comprehensive curriculum.

Teaching Tip: Don't Just Invest in the Market, Invest in Student Success

Okay, so far you've used technology to plan, find and deliver in-class lessons (with Virtual Economics), and you've looked at a number of supplemental, print-based lesson plans (everything from the Grades 6-8 Economic Package to science, mathematics and geography, to Financial Fitness for Life).

But your students are pretty "wired," aren't they? Chances are they spend a lot of time online, or at least they're itching to. Here's your chance to supplement your print-based lessons with computer-based activities...

With EconEdLink.org, you'll have access to over 95 free middle school economic and personal finance lesson plans.

And your students will always be "doing" things, like:

Some teacher highlights you'll find on EconEdLink.org include:

These lessons will not only give you practical, interactive online lessons, they will also help your student build and fine-tune their computer-literacy skills. And because the students are working at their own pace, EconEdLink.org gives you a chance to spend one-on-one time with your students... not to mention stake your claim in the computer lab.

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You don't need to use all of these resources, just find the one -- or ones -- that fit your teaching style and meet your instructional goals.

If you have any questions about these resources, give us a call and we'll explain them in more detail: 800-338-1192.

Good luck, we hope this year is your best teaching year ever!

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© Council for Economic Education

About the author:
Troy D. White is the Senior Director of Sales and Marketing for the Council for Economic Education, where he travels around the U.S. helping K-12 teachers find economic and personal finance lesson plans for their classrooms. He can be reached at twhite@councilforeconed.org or 212-730-1791.

Special thanks to Martina Krivankova, Kathy Miles and Sean Tubridy for their contributions.

You may post, share and distribute this article, as long as you don't change its content. Please provide the following attribution: Courtesy Council for Economic Education, www.councilforeconed.org