Today the children started their own market system without even knowing it!  Since several of them had brought in things(from nature only) to use building their fairy houses I let them know that they were welcome to share if they felt it was fair.  Wow! In no time at all, they were trading all sorts of commodities!  After, students got together with their groups and discussed their trades and weather they were fair or not.  These seven year olds had some very insightful thoughts about the process.  I’m excited to see how this evolves with our other lessons about needs and wants, systems, how people participate in a system, and how people’s decisions affect systems.

Here are some of the things that I heard out in the woods while the students worked and traded today:

"Look! Fairies!"
"Are those fairies or just flies." 
"I think we might need to rebuild." 
"Timber!" 
"Stop your complaining. I did all the hard work." 
"Jackpot! We found the jackpot!" 
"Some fairies or animals visited our house 
again and ate all of our food!" 
"We made a deal and traded some bark for seashells."
 "Dude, it has a whole in it!" 
"Whoa! Check this out!" 
"I like your fairy house! It's really nice!" 
"Do you want to make a deal? We have tons of bark. 
Do you have anything?" "We want to trade something!" 
"Come to our fairy house and see all the stuff we have." 
"Thank you."
"We have to build more on our house."
 "Look what I just traded guys." 
"Can you help me find some berries?" 
"We are just trading, trading, trading so much stuff. 
We're getting better "There are so many customers!" 
"We have leaves. Really great leaves!"
 "Found a mushroom." 
"We could use these for booster seats if there are any 
kid fairies." 
"It was fair, but we got lots of stuff for just wood."

And back in the classroom:
“It was all fair, but we got some really cool stuff for just some wood.”
I was able to trade for so much with only seashells.”
“We found some berries and then everyone got so excited and wanted to trade for them. We weren’t really thinking about it and in the end, all we had left were some sticks and stuff. all of our berries were gone.”