Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Rationing

So, Alex was given an assignment on rationing this past week.  The assignment is for Social Studies, he is currently learning about World War II.

The premise of the assignment is to help the students gain a perspective on what our country was like during the war, and what we had to do in order to maintain supplies. 

The actual assignment involved rationing out activities and snacks for one afternoon.  Alex was given 4 tickets for each activity and for a snack.  In total, he was given 16 tickets; video games, tv, music and snacks being the activities to ration.  One ticket equaled either 5 minutes of an activity or one small sugary treat.  Alex was then instructed to use one weekday afternoon to practice rationing. 

This assignment meant Alex was allowed to play video games and watch TV on a School Day.

Izzy was feeling a bit slighted, that she was not assigned this project when she was in Fifth Grade, and expressed her opinions with those ever irritating words "That's NOT FAIR!".  She too, wanted 20 minutes of game time to enjoy.

So, I have decided that maybe it is time to make things fair!

Tonight, we will begin our own Rationing Project, and hopefully we will all gain a little bit of a new perspective.

Bonus, I already have all the materials I need in order to begin rations.


I do intend to wash the jars, they were in the basement.

Materials:

1, now defunct, poker chip set with lots of tokens
Small Glass Jars, once used to earn tokens for money.  These jars will now be used to hold ration tokens.

The kids can redeem their tokens for the following:

1 White = Computer for 10 minutes (this excludes homework assignments)
1 Blue = TV time for 10 minutes and if they pool their resources (5 Blue Tokens) they can redeem it for a movie on Friday or Saturday Night
1 Red = Video Games for 15 minutes
1 Black = 1 SMALL Sugary Treat

Now to figure out how many to hand out....

3 White Tokens
3 Blue Tokens
2 Red Tokens
1 Black Token

For each weekend, since we do not watch TV or play Video Games/Computer during the week.

I wonder how the kids will feel about our new project.

3 comments:

  1. I think it is a great idea!

    Jaime
    www.detaileddecorator.com

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  2. Thanks. I got some weird looks, to include from The Hubs.

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  3. Just an update to our Rationing Project. When explained to Alex, what we were doing. He dropped his head and sighed. He then mumbled something along the lines of "I need to remember to "Thank" my teacher for this one". There was quite a bit of sarcasm in his tone.

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