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MoneySmart: The house of needs and wants

Teacher guide MoneySmart: The house of needs and wants

TLF ID M017869

This is a unit of work integrating aspects of the mathematics, English and science curriculums around planning a school breakfast. The unit was written for year 3 and is intended to take about 12 hours. It consists of 11 student activities supported by teacher notes on curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Student activities include role plays about needs and wants, interviewing other students and adults, comparing products, conducting an experiment on the relative strength of paper serviettes, calculating change, and preparing the breakfast. The resource provides advice on formative and summative assessment, student worksheets, and links to websites and digital resources.

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Educational details

Educational value
  • This resource is of value for aspects of each of the strands in the year 3 mathematics curriculum. Its breakfast theme provides a familiar everyday context for mathematics. Its student activities involving money, measurement and data are relevant for content descriptions and elements of the achievement standard that refer, directly or indirectly, to developing increasingly efficient mental strategies for computation, representing money values in multiple ways and counting change required for simple transactions, measuring and comparing objects using familiar metric units, and collecting data and creating displays using tables.
  • The resource is also of value for the English and science curriculums. In English, the needs and wants role-plays support the content description that refers to persuasive texts. The resource, particularly the serviette experiment, is also a practical introduction to the year 4 scientific concept of forces. The actual operation of the experiment supports numerous content descriptions in the Science Inquiry strand and part of the achievement standard that refers to recording observations, representing data, comparing results with predictions, and communicating findings in a simple report.
  • The resource has considerable value for a number of the general capabilities, connecting with the organising elements of composing texts (literacy), estimating and calculating with whole numbers (numeracy), and inquiring - identifying, exploring and organising information and ideas, and generating ideas, possibilities and actions (critical and creative thinking).
  • The resource is also very useful for the National Consumer and Financial Literacy Framework. It supports learnings at the year 4 band in two of the three dimensions of the Framework. These learnings include explaining why similar goods and services may vary in price, prioritising different needs and wants (Knowledge and understanding dimension); and using money to buy basic goods and services in 'real-life' contexts, creating simple budgets for specific purposes, classifying and comparing goods and services, and ordering and discussing reasons for spending preferences (Competence dimension).
Year level

3; 4

Topics Safety Addition Measuring instruments Decision making Units of measurement Consumer goods Dimensions Magnetism Budgeting Money Data analysis Kilograms Data representation Brands Volume (Dimensions) Data collection Gravity Graphs (Data representation) Purchasing Communication skills Report writing Experiments Discussions (Texts) Pricing Scientific inquiry Spreadsheets Subtraction Instrumentation (Technology) Needs (Economics) Fundamental forces Evaluation Text types Friction Mechanical energy Statistical frequency Predictions (Science) Instructions Vocabularies Menus Mental arithmetic SI units Patterns Similarity (Classification) Scaffolding (Teaching methods) Discrete data Categorical data Commutativity Associativity Text purpose Explanations (Scientific inquiry) Research questions Modelling
Learning area
  • English
  • Mathematics
  • Science

Other details

Contributors
  • Contributor
  • Name: Education Services Australia
  • Organization: Education Services Australia
  • Description: Data manager
  • Address: VIC, AUSTRALIA
  • URL: http://www.esa.edu.au/
  • Copyright Holder
  • Name: Australian Securities and Investments Commission
  • Organization: Australian Securities and Investments Commission
  • URL: http://www.asic.gov.au/
  • Publisher
  • Name: Australian Securities and Investments Commission
  • Organization: Australian Securities and Investments Commission
  • Description: Publisher
  • URL: http://www.asic.gov.au/
  • Resource metadata contributed by
  • Name: Education Services Australia Ltd
  • Organisation: Education Services Australia Ltd
  • Address: AUSTRALIA
  • URL: www.esa.edu.au
Access profile
  • Unknown
Learning Resource Type
  • Online
Rights
  • © Australian Securities and Investments Commission 2015. This material is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 Australia Licence.