JA Day teaches seventh-graders
about global marketplace
By Scott Mitchell Johnson
Staff Writer
PRESQUE ISLE — Seventh-graders at Presque Isle Middle School recently had the opportunity to learn practical information about what makes international trade work and how it affects their daily lives as part of JA Day at PIMS.
Junior Achievement’s JA Global Marketplace is an interactive, hands-on program that helps students understand complex business concepts and practices involving world trade.
“Junior Achievement is a statewide organization that tries to promote economic education in schools,” said PIMS teacher Kevin Sipe, “and it consists of volunteers who come in to do the programming. For us, we had an entire day. The kids did nothing but discuss economics.”
Students participated in six sessions specifically designed to introduce key aspects of the global economy including international markets, laws, cultures, human resources, flow of information, and currency exchange.
“The sessions were led by volunteers from the local business community,” said Sipe. “This is the first year our seventh-graders have been part of Junior Achievement. The eighth-graders do a unit on personal finance, so we chose international trade because it fits into our European history curriculum.
“With tight budget times, having an organization come in and lead a unit is great,” he said, “plus the materials are all free for the students. Another thing I like is that sometimes students listen differently when you have someone come in from the outside. They listen to me, but when someone from a bank comes in and talks about currency and exchange rates, it makes more sense to them because they’re hearing it from someone who does it. That helped engage the kids which is very important.”
Student Olivia Mosher was interested in the currency exchange session.
“I thought it was interesting because it’s pretty easy math. We learned about Euros and how to convert American dollars to Euros. We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of different currencies,” she said. “That was pretty much all new information for me and I learned a lot including that more than half of our imports are from China. I’m glad the Junior Achievement program exists.”
Braden Paul said there was “a lot of new material to learn.”
“It was learning, but it was done in a fun, hands-on way,” he said. “I learned that the printing press helped increase literacy in Europe. I hope JA continues to work with PIMS. I think some of the concepts are little early for seventh grade, but it’s a good time for a lot of them. All in all, I enjoyed it and learned a lot.”
“X Marks the Spot” featured a treasure hunt where the students would look around the room and try to determine where certain items came from.
“Then the volunteer would give us a sticker with an ‘X’ on it and we’d put it on a map of the country that something came from,” said student Adam Paterson. “Most of the X’s were around China, Korea and Japan. That didn’t surprise me at all.
“I want to be an architect, so I’m going to need to be able to do business with other countries to make structures for them,” he said. “If I ever do business with Japan and have a meeting with them, for example, I learned that you have to be prepared to bring gifts and dress a certain way. We learned about the cultures and I think that will help me in my future.”
Sipe said the information the students learned will resurface during the school year.
“We’ll be incorporating those ideas into what we do as the year continues,” he said. “Every time we study a country, we’ll look at its economy, gross domestic product (GDP), and things like that. We’ll be able to tie everything together and remind them of what they learned during JA Day.
“They [the students] need to understand the basics of economy and how economies run. I don’t think they’ve had much exposure to GDP, scarcity, natural resources, imports and exports until now,” said Sipe. “The hope is they’ll have a better understanding of economics so when they go through the rest of their years in school, they’ll have the basics that they can use.”
Junior Achievement’s purpose is to educate and inspire young people to value free enterprise, business and economics to improve the quality of their lives. For more information on the organization, log onto www.ja.org.
