Blog
Business Cycle Lesson Activity
David Carpenter
3rd November 2012
I'm going to be discussing economic growth and the business cycle in my first Business Studies lesson back after half term, and am hoping this activity will really help the students to think carefully about how the changing business cycle affects a business.
This activity is designed to occupy roughly the second half of my one hour lesson on economic growth & the business cycle. FIrst of all, I'm going to put the students into four groups and hand out the four sheets for 'boom', 'recession', 'slump', and 'recovery' (slides 3-6). These contain a variety of images, cartoons, and headlines that will hopefully act as a useful stimulus for those groups to consider what it happening to each of these key economic factors:
- confidence
- spending
- incomes
- unemployment
- inflation
- investment
After they've had time to discuss and decide on their answers, I will give each student the worksheet on slide 1 and, whilst we're receiving feedback from each group in turn, everyone can complete the sheet. This way they all get a complete set of notes to take home with.
I've used PowerPoint for this as it seemed the easiest programme, hence the earlier references to slides. Also I've put the 'answers' on slide 2- although remember these are what we would expect to happen in each of these situations, the real world is always more complicated. To download the powerpoint please click here .