Year 5/6 Bulletin

A trip to Prahran Market

Learning Intention: To understand how to plan and budget for a purpose.

Learning experience overview:

Within our big idea “As a consumer, my decisions are affected by my financial situation, my needs and my wants” we have explored how our needs and wants can be influenced by a variety of reasons. The experience the students had to undertake focused on the influence of financial constraints based on being able to plan a lunch on a strict $5 per person budget. The purpose of this excursion was to expose students to a market environment and what it means to be an informed consumer, ensuring students researched quality, quantity and pricing of a product they needed. 

Students decided that partnering or even making groups was the best way to ensure that their $5 was going to get them enough to purchase the ingredients to make lunch. See pictures below for some of the end products from our excursion. 

Prompts/questions

• How will you plan to buy a $5 lunch? Is the focus on the end product or what you will need in order to get there?
• What is a consumer?
• What does it mean to be an informed consumer?
• What is a need? What is a want?
• Is $5 enough? What else could you do without changing the $5 amount for everyone?

Reflections:

Wins

• We made enough food for everyone in our group. We put together all our $5 to make $25 and were able to bargain with some of the stall holders
• We were able to use the ingredients to cook our lunch in the kids kitchen
• We stayed within our budget, cooked the food and it tasted nice
• We budgeted our money well enough to get all of our needs and had money left over for our wants
• We bought all of our ingredients first, so it showed we were well prepared
• We had a lot of money in our group ($45) so we were able to buy enough ingredients for seconds of our lunch

Obstacles

• With 10 minutes to go, we didn’t have any food, so we had to rush to buy all of the ingredients
• It was hard to find all of the ingredients we needed
• Which ingredients to buy because of the prices, quality and the quantity we needed
• Markets can be expensive, depending on what ingredients you need to buy
• We burnt the pasta
• Cheese is expensive

Wonderings

• Could we have found better prices for our ingredients? Cheaper options
• Would our lunch have been better if we made a larger group to have more money?
• What would it be like with a $10 budget?
• What would we change for our lunch next time?
• Would it have been different if we had more time at the market?
• Would $5 have been different if we went to a supermarket instead?

Examples of students work:

What you can do now (to continue the learning at home from this experience):

• Continue exposing your children to market/supermarket experiences so they can build on their knowledge learnt from the excursion
• Encourage your children to work within a budget, which could be planning for a birthday party or even looking at how to spend $20 most effectively
• Where possible, continue to expose your children to using cash, so they can see the process of buying and change being received. 
• Have a discussion with your child. Discuss challenges, obstacles and what worked well on the excursion.