That's Life Baby ....

Did a great activity today in health class. I have done this activity for a number of years and it dovetails perfectly in a flipped setting because I have more time to set it up. Prior to today, we have already learned about male reproductive system & female reproductive system(vodcasts & charts), fertilization (vodcast & notes), and contraception (research chart & bag-o-beads game. Today's focus is on teen pregnancy, especially the socio-economic effect it has on them. It opens up the door To a ton of different discussion points.

Each group gets a gameboard, cards & dice. Each student gets a life scenario sheet that has a pre-set life situation that a teen parent might be in. It has their job, hours, pay and other possible life scenarios like insurance? Day care? A car? Etc ... Each of the 8 scenarios are different. The students then play the game by rolling the dice and following the directions on the card. Some cards will have them paying out money, some will be getting money (gifts, paycheck,etc) and some will be for changes in pay or hours.

They keep track of what they had to spend their money on on the sheet as well as a running total of their bank account. Everyone starts with $500 and it goes from there. It is rare that the students increase their balance. Most end up worse than they started. They complain a lot about what they have to pay for ... Like a fixing a water heater, pay for an oil change, pay taxes, buying diapers & formula, etc ... All real life things that have to be accounted for.

Great discussions can be had the next day. Tomorrow I will do a math activity on credit cards because so many kids go into debt during the activity. We talk about how cards & interest basically work and how much you pay for things if you can't pay the card off. We will also talk about how frustrating their life was because of one moment of passion. You can go into all kinds of other points stemming from experiences from this activity. This activity is great for including some math and problem solving skills. They not only need to add and subtract but re-configure pay raises, lost wages due to missing work, etc.

Some samples of the forms can be found here. I got this idea and modified it a little from a conference I went to about 7 years ago in Oshkosh WI so I can't take all the credit .. :)