Are You a Producer or a Consumer?

Explicit instruction/Teacher modeling

• Tell your students that people who use services and goods are called consumers, and people typically pay money to receive goods and services.
• Define producers as people who provide or make goods and services for consumers.
• Draw 2 boxes on the whiteboard or chart paper.
• Label one box Goods and the other Services.
• Ask student volunteers to give examples of goods and services people pay for, and put their answers in the appropriate boxes.

Guided practice/Interactive modeling

• Ask your students to explain some of the chores they do around their house.
• Discuss how parents provide many services around the house without pay, such as cooking and cleaning. Potential guiding questions include: What services do your parents perform to help you out? Do they cook for you? Do they clean?
• Ask your students to further identify services that people use. Great discussion questions include: Why are the work or services people do in a family important? What are some other goods and services your families consume from outside of the family?

Independent working time

• Hand out construction paper.
• Ask your students to draw a line down the middle and label one side Producer and one side Consumer.
• Direct your students to list and illustrate 4 types of producers in the Producer column.
• Ask students to write the services or goods provided by the producers.
• In the Consumer column, instruct your students to list who would use or consume the services or goods listed across from them.

• Enrichment: Direct your students to create a list of producers and consumers in a family community and in the school community. Ask them to write a paragraph comparing the similarities and differences from the two communities.
• Support: Give your students one example, such as buying milk. Ask your students to identify who the consumer or producer is in this situation.

• Collect independent work to assess.

• Ask for volunteers to come up in front of the class to discuss what they wrote.
• Create an imagined city, and ask your students to come up with a list of consumers and producers in the city.