Type: Primary School

Recommended for 1^st grade

The family is children's first microuniverse, and understanding it is essential for the relationships they will develop in the future both personally and professionally. The Our Families module helps students identify their family's living needs and desires and begin to understand their parents' decisions and actions.

PROGRAM OBJECTIVE

Part of JA's Life Skills Development national program, the Our Families module aims to include the concept of personal economics in a family context, enabling students to understand the role families play in the local economy: jobs and their economic impact, needs or wants of each family member and decisions about how to meet them.

EDUCATIONAL CONTENT

The Our Families module provides classroom activities in the form of an optional or extracurricular subject, using a kit of educational materials which includes:

• teacher’s guide;
• student’s workbook;
• auxiliary materials.

There are five topics in the module, which students work through under the guidance of their teachers and volunteers from the banking sector.

SKILLS DEVELOPED

• Information analysis • Active listening • Activity matching • Interpreting information • Teamwork • Decision-making

ACTIVITY LIST

1. Family members
   Students identify family members and understand the importance of jobs in relation to family income and well-being.
2. Family jobs
   Students learn more about their family members in terms of their jobs: What skills do they need? What tools do they use at work?
3. Family needs and wants
   Each family member has their own needs and wants. Students come to understand that families have to make choices about their needs and desires, and therefore cannot always have everything they want.
4. How do families fulfil their needs and wants?
   Students find out how can families meet their needs and wants and understand that shops, schools, travel agencies and hospitals are all there to help.
5. How do families pay for their needs or wants?
   Most needs or wants come at a cost, and students understand that families have to pay for them and sometimes make difficult choices about the things they need or want.

"Through the Our Families module, students learned how to distinguish between a need and a want. From talking to parents, we found that students had become more understanding when certain desires could not be met. Learning about how to create a budget and spend family money is just one of the positive impacts of the program." – Mariana Topa, teacher, Nichita Stanescu School No 17, Galati.