Hampshire primary
schools resource
directory for financial
education
Needs and wants (2)
Courtesy of St Bede’s Catholic Voluntary Aided
Primary School
The activities in this resource activity would provide a useful
follow up programme to Needs and wants (1).
This activity has aspects that will support schools seeking to
meet the requirements of:
•
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
(UNCRC)
•
primary personal, social and health education
(PSHE)/citizenship curriculum.
Through follow up discussions on how pupils manage their
own personal budgets, the importance of families prioritising
their expenditure to address needs and wants and issues
around helping others has potential to support schools in the
work in connection with:
•
school self-evaluation form (SEF)
•
healthy eating
•
Every child matters.
This resource can also be used to support several areas of
the curriculum, the clearest opportunities being:
•
English
– synthesize information from a range of sources to
sort and categorise by criteria
– spot connections and links between how information
is presented in different forms
•
PSHE/citizenship/English
– collaborative group work using discussions to
question, hypothesize, predict, simulate, and develop
thinking about complex issues and ideas.
– to listen, reflect on, comment and make decisions
using role play and enquiry based learning and
thinking skills.
Teachers may find the following ideas useful for developing
follow up work and/or extension opportunities:
•
religious education (RE)/PSHE/citizenship/mathematics/
information and communications technology (ICT)
– develop informed attitudes about wealth by exploring
cultural and social diversity/consider moral choices/
identify and respect the differences and similarities
between people.
HIAS PDL website
Needs and wants (2)
1
– use a spreadsheet, calculator and/or table to plan a
budget from a given amount/use rounding and
estimation to aid with calculation.
2
Needs and wants (2)
HIAS PDL website
Introduction
This resource consists of three activities. Although each of
the activities is discrete and can be successfully run as a
stand alone activity, completing all three in the sequence
given in this resource has the potential to create a learning
path for pupils to enhance their understanding of:
•
needs and wants
•
how needs and wants may vary with circumstances or
where people live in the world
•
how needs and wants are not only linked to physical
items which can be purchased.
Activity 1 uses examples of every day family purchasing for
pupils to plan a family budget. It is aimed to enhance pupils’
understanding of what is an essential purchase and what
could be defined as a want and how families need to make
choices when spending money. The teacher providing this
resource has suggested the activity could be entitled Pop
goes the weasel and would be made particularly engaging
for the pupils support by asking them to recite the rhyme at
some stage with an explanation of why it is relevant to this
activity and researching the history of the lyrics:
www.rhymes.org.uk/a116a-pop-goes-the-weasel.htm .
Activity 2 challenges pupils to consider some quotations from
Mother Teresa and discuss whether all needs can be met
through spending money.
Activity 3 asks pupils to place value on their own
possessions.
Teacher preparation
Activity 1a requires:
HIAS PDL website
•
pupils to draw up a budget for a family’s expenditure for
one week. The activity would be particularly engaging if
real products to represent the categories of items – food,
power, medicines, clothing/footwear/leisure – could be
made available. Pictures could be printed as an
alternative. Resource 4 offers some copyright free
pictures which teachers may find useful
•
pupils to work in groups of four or five with an adult
supporter for each group. It will be necessary to arrange
before starting the activity that sufficient
Needs and wants (2)
3
teachers/teaching assistants/volunteers are available to
support each group
•
teachers to research approximate current cost of the
range of items to be used in the activity to give
authenticity and enable adult supporters to offer
informed support to the discussions, eg: how much is a
family of four likely to spend on milk, bread a week, how
much on leisure activities, power, medicines, etc
•
preparation of cards with budget amounts (examples
given in Resource 3 – Price cards).
Activity 1 – The family budget
Teachers may need to confirm pupils’ understanding of the
following key words:
•
budget
•
priority
•
leisure activities.
Part A
Recommended time: 20 minutes
4
•
Each group to represent a family – choose their family’s
name. There are four people in the family but pupils can
decide the composition of the family, eg both a mum and
a dad/single parent/number of children/elderly relative
living with the family.
•
Each family is allocated a budget, eg: £200 which they
have to spend on a week’s housekeeping for their family
– Resource 1 is a task card that can be printed for
distribution one to each family.
•
Each family is given a scenario based on a family living
in a house near to the school – Resource 2 lists ten
suggestions for scenarios.
•
Groups use price cards (Resource 3 gives examples) to
allocate their budget for the week against the items they
plan on purchasing. The adult supporter to give
guidance on prioritising, realistic costings and the need
to stay in budget. The family may find it useful to appoint
one of them as an accountant who will keep a note of
the total proposed expenditure as they work through the
activity.
Needs and wants (2)
HIAS PDL website
•
Family to give a presentation on how they allocated their
budget and why.
Part B – Role play
•
A five minute breakfast scene.
•
Rule: Money (spending/finance/buying/saving) must be
mentioned at least once during the scene.
Activity 2 – Needs and wants across the
world
Pupils to consider the four key quotes from Mother Teresa
about wealth. These are provided both as a PowerPoint
(Resource 5) and in PDF format (Resource 6) for printing off
in hard copy and distribution around the class.
The BBC website below is a source of information for
teachers on Mother Teresa and her life’s work fighting
poverty and disease in the poorest regions to start the
discussion.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/5/
newsid_2499000/2499693.stm .
Class discussion or group discussions followed by
presentations on needs that cannot be bought, and how we
can make a difference in the developed world, eg:
conserving, saving for causes, links with deprived schools,
etc.
Activity 3 – What is the value of our
possessions?
Pupils to be asked to:
•
consider how many clothes/pairs of shoes/CDs/
computer games/clothes, etc, they have. Make
comparisons with children in underdeveloped countries
such as Kenya.
Resource:
www.oxfam.org.uk/education/resources/change_the_worl
d_in_eight_steps/files/goal1_info_and_activities.pdf
HIAS PDL website
Needs and wants (2)
5
•
make a list of their ten favourite possessions and say
why they are important
•
imagine giving up some of their treasured possessions
to help poor people, eg: by selling at a car boot sale to
raise money for charity) and explain how they would feel.
Extension activities appropriate for gifted and talented group
could focus on basic economic theory of supply and demand
and the impact on the prices of the scarcity of needs – when
supply falls or demand increases the price is likely to rise.
6
Needs and wants (2)
HIAS PDL website