Lesson Activity - Economic Cycle in Pictures

Here is a great starter activity created by WOW Economics Team member Ruth Tarrant that gets students thinking about what can happen at each stage of the economic cycle.

The resource works well either as a printed handout that students can annotate or on an IWB or as a PowerPoint for students to complete.

One effective approach is to ask your students to decide at which stage of the business cycle these events / images might occur. They then place the letters associated with each image on one of the two cycle slides - one carries real world data for the UK and the other is a stylised diagram showing a business cycle.

It could leads into a discussion of coincident indicators, leading and lagging indicators. Later on the activity should help to reinforce concepts from AD and AS analysis especially the non-linear AS curve at different levels of capacity utilisation.

I am sure there will be many other symptoms of stages of the cycle that could be incorporated into a revised resource - students could be encouraged to choose another two or three of their own e.g. by searching for the ever growing selection of anecdotal indicators!

Download Economic Cycle in Pictures *PowerPoint .pptx format)