Factory Workers & Assembly Lines

           We started talking about one of my favorite topics today in class: Economics! First grade economics focuses on basic concepts like goods and services and wants and needs. Today's introduction focused on goods and how they are made. We spotlighted factories as places that make the goods we buy at Target, Walmart, and various other stores. What better way to study factories than pretend we work in them! We did our own little factory simulation when we got into groups and created assembly lines to make bookmarks for each person in the group. Each member of the group was assigned a special job in creating the bookmarks. This activity was a lot of fun for the kids and was a perfect opportunity for them gain a better understanding of what goods are, why factories and assembly lines are important (and efficient), and even why teamwork is so important!  

Check out some of the photos below of some of our little factory workers!

     You can see from the photos that I put the students into groups of 4 and then assigned them each a job. The first person cut the bookmarks out from a template, the second person punched a hole in the top of the bookmark and cut a small piece of yarn to pass to the next person, the third person tied the yarn onto the bookmark for a marker, and the final person decorated it with stickers.