Our Thriving Economy
Second Grade, Carlisa Endoso and Allison McCall

Second grade teachers and students have created an in-class economy with jobs, salaries, a bank, checkbooks, and a class store for each of the second grade classes at Explorer.  The learning that takes place in our Thriving Economy project is experiential and based in real world interactions.  Thus, it is ideally suited for children with special needs or who are English Language Learners. For children who are able to work at more advanced levels, the project has many complex possibilities, such as modeling supply and demand, allowing for differentiation on many levels.   
 
California state social studies standards for second grade include learning about basic economic concepts and demonstrating basic economic reasoning skills.  Second grade math standards include making change from dollars and coin combinations, learning about decimals, recording data and interpreting numerical data.  We have combined all of these in an integrated way through our Thriving Economy project.
 
Our overarching theme in second grade is Relationships.  We integrate this theme across the curriculum, so that children begin to see how “big ideas” or abstract concepts can apply in many different areas of study.  This project is rich with relationships to analyze – such as supply and demand, sellers and consumers, saving and spending, price and quantity, wealth and poverty. Students in second grade have classroom jobs that encourage responsibility and ownership for the classroom.  Each job has a salary. There is a class bank, and each child is responsible for maintaining a checkbook ledger and balancing it weekly. 
 
The children are involved from the start: naming the store, determining the products to be sold, and setting prices.  Classroom cashiers operate authentic cash registers using real money.  Classroom buyers and suppliers record data from the store’s expenses and sales, and create, analyze, and interpret graphs using this data.  They learn about profits and losses, and depending on the store’s performance, they may have to change its inventory and its pricing. Through this project, the students have gained a thorough understanding of how the economy works, and have become competent at recording and analyzing financial data.  Students interest in the real-world economy has increased, which we have seen through daily inquiries, going shopping with their parents, watching parents pay bills, reading newspapers and watching financial and economic news.
 
With the guidance of Excel Youth Zone, the second grade classes have joined the Kiva organization to integrate a service learning component to our Thriving Economy project. Kiva is a micro-lending organization, enabling individuals to lend directly to entrepreneurs in the developing world. As a class, we browsed entrepreneurs' profiles on the website, chose someone to lend to, and then, made a loan that will be repaid within six months to a year. It has been tremendously exciting to help a real person make strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. The classroom work that the children have done with pricing, selling, accounting, and saving makes this real world application even more meaningful.
 
Special funding for this project was awarded to the second grade classes by the San Diego Teachers Fund and Donors Choose.