stock market class

Tech House Member Joined: 22 May 2003 Posts: 363

I have been wanted to teach an enrichment class at my school for a long time and I was just told that I will be teaching a stock market/business management class so I am very excited. However, I have no curriculum and no guidelines so I am asking for any ideas/resources that you might know of on how to explain business to middle school students (ages 11-13). I have some board games already and I am looking for good websites, articles or computer games that are easy to understand.

Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2008 6:51 am

i remember a fun project from US history in 10th grade (no reason middle school can't do this).
put the kids in pairs and give them a pretend $10,000 to invest in the stock market. each pair gets a copy of the wall street journal to research stocks. you could have them divide up the money however they wanted, but we had two choose two different types of stocks to "invest in." we divided up the money however we felt we would make the most profit. this was done on a monday morning. the following monday morning bring in new copies of the wall street journal and have them report back to the class on how much money they earned or lost.
me and my friend nicole made the most money, something like $27,000. wish i remembered what stock that was.....

Slutzilla Joined: 12 May 2003 Posts: 523

We did a similar project in my high school economics class. It was a semester long project. If you go with this type of project, I recommend having each person or group hand in some kind of weekly reports.

Perhaps have them each build and excel spreadsheet that they can use to track the progress of everything. The reason is that we had a lot of people in my class wait till the end of the semester and then look through some archived newspapers and only pick the stocks that made money.

Lifeless Reject Joined: 05 May 2003 Posts: 2046

I did the same game Elisa mentioned in my Talent Pool group when I was in 4th or 5th grade. It seems like a great concept now, however back then it seemed very confusing so I didn't do it. I think if we'd been given some sort of a fun prize incentive to stand for the money it might have helped give me more reason to try to figure it out. I think one of the big obstacles I had was that anything more than $50 was kind of hard for me to fathom in terms of worth...

Tech House Member Joined: 22 May 2003 Posts: 363

Thanks for the ideas...I have a website that is a virtual stock market tracker so hopefully this will be one of the main topics/projects. Keep the ideas coming Smile

Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2008 8:34 am

I assume you'll teach them about barter, then how currency can be used as storing the value of performing a service or selling a good, and end up with more advanced markets like bonds and stocks.

I would let the kids participate in each type of system, not just the stock market. The kids can easily see the simple markets at work in their everyday lives. It shows them what they can do when they pool resources (stocks and bonds) and what is at risk when they choose to trust others with their currency.

I'm sure you'll have a lot of fun with that class!

Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2008 10:19 am

Since your topic includes business management, I thought I'd include a project we did for that in my school. It was a two week project. We were divided into groups and had to form a "small business" with a leader (owner), treasurer, and workers. Groups usually made school-themed key chains (in class colors or school colors) or flower pots or hair things, etc. We had a week to make the products, and a certain amount of money to pay for start up and couldn't exceed that amount. Then we had one week to market and sell them at school during lunch period. Some groups lost money, some made money, some broke even. Proceeds ended up going to charity. And obviously we had permission from the school to sell the items to other students. May or may not apply to your class, but it was fun.