The Milwaukee Film Festival is actually a year-round organization.  Part of what they do is provide educators curricular assistance with implementation of film in the classroom.  Recently, they offered teachers the ability to show the film Growing Up Milwaukee in the classroom.  This movie perfectly aligns with the content we have been covering; especially since some of the film takes place in the exact neighborhoods we have read about in Evicted.

Today, we started our Growing Up Milwaukee process with a discussion on the importance of your Zip Code.  Feel free to look at the set of classroom discussion questions we started with; linked here.

Many of the students have been interested in the recent government spending bills.  They have lots of questions and demand answers.  Today, we read the weekly Planet Money Newsletter (Planet Money is an economic-focused podcast put on by NPR); which summarized a lot of the proposed spending as of late.

Feel free to check out the newsletter here so that you can engage in a conversation with your child.  Additionally, some students seemed fascinated with our country’s debt so we took a detour to look at the debt clock (located here).

Although I handed it out in October, we are finally getting to start reading parts of our book Evicted.  We are only reading portions of the non-fiction book, but these parts are powerful and impactful.  They connect with the content of what we have covered (poverty in Milwaukee) and help further fuel the “why” behind our desire to help those in need and make our world a better place.

As we read, students will be given different levels of questions to help further direct their thinking as it relates to what they are reading.  They all have a copy of the book (thanks in large part to the Judee Ross Imagination Grant) so feel free to read along with them/steal the book when they are not looking.

It really is an amazing read, especially as it centers around our city and neighbors.

We stepped up our supply and demand curve game with some additional bits of information.  We know how a shift occurs ON the curve (so if price goes up or down, we know exactly what happens to the quantity demanded and supplied).  We are now focusing on understanding what happens to the curve itself (meaning, what shift occurs in the entire curve).  Today, we did our warm-up for the examples attached here.

Feel free to give them a try or to check out what advanced economics your child is learning (or better yet, give them some examples and ask what will happen to the supply and demand of something).