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A great site for economics

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Our mission is to promote economic literacy in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Here are some of the things we can offer you to help:

Upcoming events

Featured

In the summer of 2018, the James Madison University Center for Economic Education will be offering a five-day summer institute in personal finance June 18-22. The content is ideal for those who will be teaching the required economics and personal finance class at the high school level, but also is suitable for any educator seeking to do a better job of managing personal finances. Presentations from industry experts are combined with demonstrations of activities and materials in a casual and fast-paced atmosphere. Here's more information and a registration link: ☑ REGISTER

JMU's own Lynne Stover will be doing two national webinars this semester. Here are details and registration information:

Using Cli-Fi (Climate Fiction) to Teach Economics [Middle and High]
Wed, Mar 14, 2018 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM EDT
Cli-Fi, the "hottest" new literature genre, portrays humans dealing with extreme weather situations. Discover how dire events of such as rising water, extreme heat, and freezing temperatures are perfect situations for teaching scarcity, allocation of limited resources, and decision making. Featured titles include Life as We Knew It, The Maze Runner, and Ninth Ward. Webinar attendees will receive links to classroom-ready lessons and a topical bibliography.
Register at https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/4709048160289098754

Homelessness in Children's Literature: Tales of Struggle and Survival [Upper Elementary and Middle]
Tue, Apr 17, 2018 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM EDT This webinar focuses on fictional families facing some very real problems; hunger, parental illness, joblessness, unpaid bills, and homelessness. Students can learn valuable life lessons concerning earning, saving, spending, and creative problem solving in books such as Crenshaw, How to Steal a Dog, and Survival Strategies of the Almost Brave. Webinar attendees will receive links to classroom- ready lessons and a topical bibliography.
Register at https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/8467134923562407938

Here's a link to all the webinars in this national series:
https://www.councilforeconed.org/webinars/

Reading Makes Cent$
Elementary librarians are invited to participate in Reading Makes Cent$, a K-5 financial literacy reading initiative. Participating schools will receive three free books for their library if they agree to read at least one of the featured titles to a grade level and promote the K-5 reading program to students. This year's titles include What Pet Should I Get? By Dr. Seuss, Isabel's Car Wash by Sheila Bair, and Whoosh! Lonnie Johnson's Super-Soaking Stream of Inventions by Chris Barton. The school with the highest percentage of students participating in the reading program in each VaASL region will win $500 worth of books for their library.

K-5 students can compete by reading at least five books (or have them read to him/her) from a provided list of over fifty books. Students may submit an entry form by Friday, April 13, 2018 indicating the books they read with a sentence about their favorite title. From a drawing of all entries, two students in each VAASL region will be selected to receive Virginia529 SM inVEST SM accounts with an initial balance of $529.

Reading Makes Cent$ is an excellent way to encourage reading and reinforce the K-5 economic strand in the Social Science Standards of Learning, as well as promote saving for college. Suggested lessons, activities, and teacher workshops are available to assist teachers and librarians in understanding the concepts and presenting them to students in a meaningful and engaging manner.

This program is presented by Virginia529 College Savings Plan and the Virginia Council for Economic Education with input and support from the Virginia Association of School Librarians.

For more information, applications for librarians and students, and a link to instructional materials, visit the Reading Makes Cent$ Web site: www.readingmakescents.com.

JMU's own Lynne Stover is doing nationally promoted webinars this semester for the Council on Economic Education. All are welcome to participate. Here are descriptions and registration links:

Using Children's Literature to Teach Elementary Math and Economics
October 17 2017, 7:00PM -8:00PM EDT
Discover how picture books can give your classroom an instant boost by combining literature, math, and economics to teach activity-based lessons. ☑ REGISTER

Natural Disasters in Children's Literature: Tales of Choices and Changes
November 14, 7:00PM -8:00PM EST
Hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes are all life-changing events that encourage us to be planners and creative problem solvers. This session addresses the concepts of scarcity, incentives, opportunity cost, and survival skills using the content in popular children's books. ☑ REGISTER

Using "New" Children's Chapter Books to Teach Entrepreneurship, Economics & Ethics
December 12, 7:00PM -8:00PM EST
This session features two new chapter book series: Cleo Edison Oliver: Playground Millionaire and Billy Sure: Kid Entrepreneur. Participants will be introduced to related interactive lessons and hands-on activities. ☑ REGISTER

Here's a small grant program that may be of interest to area educators. The purpose is to provide seed money up to $250 to assist Virginia teachers to expand and promote economic and/or financial education in their K-12 classrooms. Grant applications must be received by the Virginia Council on Economic Education by November 1, 2017. Decisions will be made and checks mailed in early December 2017. Here's a link to the application form:
2017-18-Mini-Grant-Application

Page County High School has brought home a top-15 national ranking for excellence in personal finance instruction.

The school was recognized April 19 in New York City for students' no. 14 ranking on a standardized test offered by Working in Support of Education (w!se).

PCHS teacher Dianna Alger, who instructed the students in personal finance, represented the school at the New York presentation honoring the "100 Best w!se High Schools Teaching Personal Finance."

"I am so very proud of my students for doing so well on the w!se Financial Literacy Certification test. It was an honor to represent them and Page County High School at the ceremony this year," Alger said.

This is the school's second year to be nationally ranked, following last year's no. 26 ranking.

Personal finance, the study of individual money management and wealth building, is part of a required economics and personal finance course now mandatory for graduation from Virginia high schools.

"It's super for Dianna's students to go up in the rankings even as the competition is getting tougher," said Dr. William C. Wood, director of the James Madison University Center for Economic Education.

Wood pointed out that schools in 46 states participated in this year's w!se certification program, up from 36 five years ago. The JMU Center supports personal finance education in the Shenandoah Valley, with funding from Shenandoah Valley Economic Education, Inc.

Working in Support of Education (w!se) is a New York-based educational not-for-profit focused on promoting student financial literacy nationwide, and sponsored by Voya Financial®.

First established in 2003, w!se's award-winning Financial Literacy Certification program provides teachers with a curriculum and instructional resources to teach personal finance and measure students' financial literacy through w!se's Certification Test.

Students who pass the test are designated Certified Financially Literate™. w!se students in 46 states receive close to 6 million hours of personal finance instruction annually.

Here's this year's video on the program:

JMU's Lynne Stover continues to play a key role in the state delivery of the "Reading Makes Cent$" program sponsored by the Virginia Council on Economic Education and Virginia 529. The program includes free economics-related books for the libraries, associated instructional materials, and competitions for the students. Lessons authored by Stover and edited by the Virginia Council on Economic Education are available for each title. For the new school year, the three featured titles are:

My Rows and Piles of Coins by Tololwa M. Mollel, described as the story of a resourceful and thoughtful boy. The story is set in Tanzania in the 1960s.

Rock, Brock, and the Savings Shock by Sheila Bair, the story of two brothers who have very different attitudes about dealing with money.

Lemonade in Winter by Emily Jenkins illustrated by G. Brian Karas, a story about sibling entrepreneurship.

Here again is the link to the lessons: Reading Makes Cent$ lessons

. . . Gen i Revolution, that is. It's the nationally recognized game that teaches students the basics of personal finance and investing. Get started now!

Russell Kohrs of the Massanutten Regional Governor's School has won the top prize in the open state economic education awards competition sponsored by the Virginia Council on Economic Education.

The winning project was "Concentrating on Copper: An Exploration in Mineral Commodities," developed at Broadway High School. This project combined earth science principles and economic concepts to show students the importance of finite resources.

Since completing the project at Broadway, Kohrs has joined the faculty of the Massanutten Regional Governor's School for Environmental Science and Technology in Mt. Jackson.

Kohrs will be recognized at a December 11 presentation in Richmond.

The Kohrs project had earlier won the grand prize in local competition sponsored by the Harrisonburg Rotary Club and the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Chamber of Commerce.

Union Bank & Trust is now the presenting sponsor of the Global Entrepreneurship Marketplace Fair (GEM Fair). Held each year at James Madison University, the GEM Fair brings together Mini-Economics from throughout the area for a simulated international marketplace.

"We very much appreciate the sponsorship and the financial boost it will bring to this event," said Dr. William C. Wood, director of the JMU Center for Economic Education.

March 9, 2016 is now set as the date of the next GEM Fair presented by Union Bank & Trust. The venue for 2016 is JMU's Festival Conference Center. The day will include a Roll Call of the Mini-Economy nations, market session, and awards ceremony. Here's a link to more on the GEM Fair.

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Our mission is to promote economic literacy in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Here are some of the things we can offer you to help: Featured In the summer of 2018, the James Madison University Center for Economic Education will be offering a five-day summer institute in personal finance June 18-22.

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Using digital classroom magazines to read articles and view videos. Students could respond to one another by blogging on Edmodo about what they thought about the issue (new learnings, what they noticed, and what they are still wondering).

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Fifth- and sixth-grade students love Scholastic News magazine because it's filled with topics that interest them! Teachers love it because it builds knowledge and nonfiction reading skills.

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Infographics would be a cool type of text to teach on monitoring comprehension with the pictures and flow of text. Lots of topics for all grades on this site.

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© Copyright 2018 Kids Discover. All Rights Reserved.

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Read with a purpose. Have a specific question in mind (either a question from the teacher or a self created question.

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Distractions! It's hard to focus on the article when I see, "What is a booger?" in huge text next to the article.

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So there you are, sitting at lunch, enjoying some grilled-chicken pizza and a few orange wedges. When you're finished, you take a last drink of milk, wipe your mouth, and head to your next class. In a few minutes you're thinking about the capital of Oregon or your science fair project. You've completely forgotten about that pizza lunch you just ate. But it's still in your stomach - sort of like a science experiment that happens all the time!

The Mouth Starts Everything Moving

Your digestive (say: dye-JES-tiv) system started working even before you took the first bite of your pizza. And the digestive system will be busy at work on your chewed-up lunch for the next few hours - or sometimes days, depending upon what you've eaten. This process, called digestion, allows your body to get the nutrients and energy it needs from the food you eat. So let's find out what's happening to that pizza, orange, and milk.

Even before you eat, when you smell a tasty food, see it, or think about it, digestion begins. Saliva (say: suh-LYE-vuh), or spit, begins to form in your mouth.

When you do eat, the saliva breaks down the chemicals in the food a bit, which helps make the food mushy and easy to swallow. Your tongue helps out, pushing the food around while you chew with your teeth. When you're ready to swallow, the tongue pushes a tiny bit of mushed-up food called a bolus (say: BO-luss) toward the back of your throat and into the opening of your esophagus, the second part of the digestive tract.

On the Way Down

The esophagus (say: ih-SOF-eh-guss) is like a stretchy pipe that's about 10 inches (25 centimeters) long. It moves food from the back of your throat to your stomach. But also at the back of your throat is your windpipe, which allows air to come in and out of your body. When you swallow a small ball of mushed-up food or liquids, a special flap called the epiglottis (say: ep-ih-GLOT-iss) flops down over the opening of your windpipe to make sure the food enters the esophagus and not the windpipe.

If you've ever drunk something too fast, started to cough, and heard someone say that your drink "went down the wrong way," the person meant that it went down your windpipe by mistake. This happens when the epiglottis doesn't have enough time to flop down, and you cough involuntarily (without thinking about it) to clear your windpipe.

Once food has entered the esophagus, it doesn't just drop right into your stomach. Instead, muscles in the walls of the esophagus move in a wavy way to slowly squeeze the food through the esophagus. This takes about 2 or 3 seconds.

See You in the Stomach

Your stomach, which is attached to the end of the esophagus, is a stretchy sack shaped like the letter J. It has three important jobs:

1. to store the food you've eaten

2. to break down the food into a liquidy mixture

3. to slowly empty that liquidy mixture into the small intestine

The stomach is like a mixer, churning and mashing together all the small balls of food that came down the esophagus into smaller and smaller pieces. It does this with help from the strong muscles in the walls of the stomach and gastric (say: GAS-trik) juices that also come from the stomach's walls. In addition to breaking down food, gastric juices also help kill bacteria that might be in the eaten food.

Onward to the small intestine!

22 Feet Isn't Small at All

The small intestine (say: in-TESS-tin) is a long tube that's about 1½ inches to 2 inches (about 3.5 to 5 centimeters) around, and it's packed inside you beneath your stomach. If you stretched out an adult's small intestine, it would be about 22 feet long (6.7 meters) - that's like 22 notebooks lined up end to end, all in a row!

The small intestine breaks down the food mixture even more so your body can absorb all the vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. The grilled chicken on your pizza is full of proteins - and a little fat - and the small intestine can help extract them with a little help from three friends: the pancreas (say: PAN-kree-uss), liver, and gallbladder.

Those organs send different juices to the first part of the small intestine. These juices help to digest food and allow the body to absorb nutrients. The pancreas makes juices that help the body digest fats and protein. A juice from the liver called bile helps to absorb fats into the bloodstream. And the gallbladder serves as a warehouse for bile, storing it until the body needs it.

Your food may spend as long as 4 hours in the small intestine and will become a very thin, watery mixture. It's time well spent because, at the end of the journey, the nutrients from your pizza, orange, and milk can pass from the intestine into the blood. Once in the blood, your body is closer to benefiting from the complex carbohydrates in the pizza crust, the vitamin C in your orange, the protein in the chicken, and the calcium in your milk.

Next stop for these nutrients: the liver! And the leftover waste - parts of the food that your body can't use - goes on to the large intestine.

Love Your Liver

The nutrient-rich blood comes directly to the liver for processing. The liver filters out harmful substances or wastes, turning some of the waste into more bile. The liver even helps figure out how many nutrients will go to the rest of the body, and how many will stay behind in storage. For example, the liver stores certain vitamins and a type of sugar your body uses for energy.

That's One Large Intestine

At 3 or 4 inches around (about 7 to 10 centimeters), the large intestine is fatter than the small intestine and it's almost the last stop on the digestive tract. Like the small intestine, it is packed into the body, and would measure 5 feet (about 1.5 meters) long if you spread it out.

The large intestine has a tiny tube with a closed end coming off it called the appendix (say: uh-PEN-dix). It's part of the digestive tract, but it doesn't seem to do anything, though it can cause big problems because it sometimes gets infected and needs to be removed.

Like we mentioned, after most of the nutrients are removed from the food mixture there is waste left over - stuff your body can't use. This stuff needs to be passed out of the body. Can you guess where it ends up? Well, here's a hint: It goes out with a flush.

Before it goes, it passes through the part of the large intestine called the colon (say: CO-lun), which is where the body gets its last chance to absorb the water and some minerals into the blood. As the water leaves the waste product, what's left gets harder and harder as it keeps moving along, until it becomes a solid. Yep, it's poop (also called stool or a bowel movement).

The large intestine pushes the poop into the rectum (say: REK-tum), the very last stop on the digestive tract. The solid waste stays here until you are ready to go to the bathroom. When you go to the bathroom, you are getting rid of this solid waste by pushing it through the anus (say: AY-nus). There's the flush we were talking about!

Dig That Digestive System

You can help your digestive system by drinking water and eating a healthy diet that includes foods rich in fiber. High-fiber foods, like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, make it easier for poop to pass through your system.

The digestive system is a pretty important part of your body. Without it, you couldn't get the nutrients you need to grow properly and stay healthy. And next time you sit down to lunch, you'll know where your food goes - from start to finish!

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So there you are, sitting at lunch, enjoying some grilled-chicken pizza and a few orange wedges. When you're finished, you take a last drink of milk, wipe your mouth, and head to your next class. In a few minutes you're thinking about the capital of Oregon or your science fair project.