Economic Unit from last year

I wasn't blogging last year when Joseph did his Economic unit. It was one of our favorite all time projects that we did and I wanted to add it here so that we would have it always.
So the following is from a post that I made on Dallas Area Moms:
Joseph's current unit in Moving Beyond the Page that he is working on is called "Economic Cycles". It was kind of funny the other day because I was supposed to explain to him what supply, demand and equilibrium are. I start out by asking him if he knows what the words mean and he launches into a whole monologue about what they are and how you can graph them to illustrate it and that the point that it crosses on the graph is equilibrium.
Well....um....yeah.
So, that was a quick lesson.

(BTW, he is not some kind of Economics Savant. He learned all of that on BrainPop. I don't know why I even bother trying to do anything with him. )

Anyway, we finished up that unit and his end of the unit project is "Becoming an Entrepeneur". He has to make four types of flavored popcorn and then do market research on which type people prefer.

First of all, He named his company "American Popcorn".

His four flavors are:

Honey Bun--A buttery, cinnamon and honey coating.

Chocolate Malt--A chocolate topping with a touch of malt.

The Big Cheese--A cheddar cheese flavor

Old Glory--(this is the most interesting one ) It is a glaze made from gelatin. So we used Blue Raspberry and Strawberry to make Red and Blue to go with his American Popcorn name.

You should have seen my kitchen this afternoon.


We made 20 samples of each and took them down to the park for market research. He approached 20 people and had them sample each one and took down their preference. The purpose was to find the two most popular, so that he could package them and sell them.

Old Glory won with 7 votes
The Big Cheese and Chocolate Malt each had 5 votes
and Honey Bun had 4 votes.
(and, yes, our sample did end up with 21 votes)

Now, we have to package them and make labels so that he can sell them. He also has to figure out how much to charge for them....which is going to require some math.
I didn't take any pictures of the process today because I was going in four directions at once trying to help him with all of the recipes. I will get pictures of the final product though.

Just thought I would share. He really enjoys these final projects after each unit.

Here is the album of pictures:


And a few updates that I made later on the board:

He sent an email to our co-op group telling them about his project and let them know that he would have popcorn for sale at co-op.The popcorn sales went very well!
He sold out of everthing by lunch!

Each bag was 50 cents...that was about 2 cups of popcorn. He came home with about $13.