Economic education website provides a plethora of resources, but teachers will have to pick and choose.
Community Review for Biz Kid$
My Take
BizKid$ is a very unique website that is structured in an accessible way for both teachers and students. There are a variety of lesson plans for middle and high school students, which include family connection activities that could act as a springboard for school-family communication and relationship building. The videos can verge on cheesy, but the content is valuable if students can look past that. The games on the site are somewhat repetitive, and it's unclear how much student learning results from gameplay. Overall, BizKid$ is a valuable resource that provides teachers with tools for economic education, an area that is often lacking in traditional curricula.
How I Use It
I implement various lesson plans in my history class throughout the course of the year to supplement certain related units. For instance, in our first unit, students learn about trade companies during the colonization of Louisiana, so we spend two days learning about the stock market because of the parallels between such companies and the modern day stock market.
It is nice to provide such present-day connections to state history and to integrate economic education for my students, which they are not exposed to otherwise, but sometimes the video episodes aren't ideal when used in isolation. It seems that the videos work better as a continuum because the stories and characters build throughout the episodes.