Trade Fairs

Having a trade fair in your classroom is not only very fun for the students (and yourself) but it is also very educational. Doing a trade fair in this way mimics fur trading that happened in the past. At this time people didn’t have money to buy things so they had to trade things in order to get what they needed or wanted.

In the classroom trade fair that we did we had the option to either buy, make, or just bring something from home that we would like to trade. We then set of all of our stuff at our seats and began bartering with other people. For example, I brought a few scarves that I made and I traded one of them for a custom made bracelet from Jasmine. Some people even brought some homemade treats to trade with (I got a lot of cookie bars for one of my scarves! Yum!).

I have done something similar when I was in sixth grade. However, it was a little different. We called this a mini economy mall. Thorough the year we all had jobs and on Fridays we got paid for those jobs. We then chose groups to work with to create a business plan for the ‘store’ that we will want open from the mall day. This was similar to the trade fair because each group could either bring something that we bought, made, or brought from home. The difference is that we had to ‘pay’ for our products with our mini economy money just like a real store would have to pay for their merchandise. There was a whole system that our teacher put together to convert what we paid in real money to what we had to pay in our mini economy money. We would only buy what we had enough money for.

Finally, we got to actually open shop. We got to sell our things as well as go around and buy stuff from other people. This was a school wide mall; meaning that all of the other grades had turns to come to the mall to buy things. One thing that I still remember that was being sold were some goldfish; one group went to a pet store and bought about five goldfish to sell for mall day!

In the end each group had to track how much we spent versus how much we made. Were we in the red? In the green? We then had to reflect on our business plan and decided if it worked out well or if there was anything that we would have changed.

So, you see, there are some many ways in which a trade fair (or different variations of a trade fair) can be used in a classroom. What ideas can you come up with for a trade fair?