Did a little stock market activity with my 3rd graders - had each group in each class pick a stock and 'buy' a share. We checked the price at the same time each day, graphed it for a week, and IDed which group in each class made the most money and which class did so altogether.
Probably not super meaningful to them, but it's the end of the school year and we were talking about different kinds of markets and ways to grow money.
Altogether, they 'made' around $25 for the week. They chose Youtube, McDonalds, etc....my homeroom was a little buji, picking Louis Vuitton and Rolls Royce, among others.
The best stocks for the week were Five Below and Minecraft (Microsoft). It was a good chance to show them how the companies they know are sometimes owned by bigger companies (Youtube > Google > Alphabet).
We also did an activity before that where we simulated 18 days of starting your own company. The focus was that spending money early on to hire workers and train them (and themselves) was worth it to make more money later on (a dollar to hire, a dollar to train, up to 3x, yielded $3/day for 3 workers for the length of the activity).
They had fun with it and loved having a fat stack of realistic learning money towards the end. The ones who just wanted to hold on to the money they made wound up with much less than the others. So that may have opened some of their eyes.
