🪙 Phase 1 - Anticipation
💬 Discussion / Gallery
⏱ 6 minutes
Task 1 - Could You Survive Without Money?
Imagine you wake up tomorrow and money has vanished. Completely.
Step 1 - Strange moneys from history
No coins, no notes, no cards, no phones for paying
🐚
Cowrie shells - Indian Ocean
🧂
Blocks of salt - ancient Africa
🍫
Cocoa beans - Aztec empire
🗡️
Bronze knife-coins - ancient China
🥇
A modern gold coin
🪨
Giant stone discs - island of Yap
"Taller than a person - and couldn't be carried at all!"
"Taller than a person - and couldn't be carried at all!"
"If money disappeared tomorrow — how would you get what you need?"
Step 2 - What would you do?
Choose one · no right answer
If money disappeared tomorrow, what would you do?
🔁 I would trade things I own for things I need
🙏 I would just ask people to give things to me
🌱 I would grow or make everything myself
🤷 I have no idea - it sounds really hard
Your answer is recorded. Let's see what happens when you actually try to trade…
Step 3 - 30-second silent challenge
Picture one toy or object you love… now imagine trying to trade it directly for a single carrot.
🧸
→
🥕
30
Step 4 - Personal journal entry
Private · saved to your portfolio · max 120 characters
If I had to trade instead of pay, I would offer…
🔒 This entry is private - only you and your teacher can see it.
Bridge to Phase 2 - Encounter
Trading sounds tricky already - and you've only imagined it for a moment. Let's see what really happens when two people try to trade without money.
What happens in Task 1
A 6-minute Phase 1 - Anticipation activity. Students see a playful gallery of six strange historical "moneys", meet the wonder question of the lesson, vote on how they would get what they need without money, sit with a 30-second silent trade challenge, then write a private journal entry.
🎯 Learning objectives
To awaken curiosity about how people got what they needed before money existed, to surface students' prior assumptions about what money actually is, and to create a personal, playful connection to the idea of trade.
♿ SEN Adaptations
- Read-aloud available on all text blocks
- Voice-to-text option for the journal entry
- A breathing-animation timer can replace the 30-second circle timer
- High-contrast display mode available
🖨️ No-Tech Format
- Teacher shows six printed images of historical currencies and describes each briefly
- Poll taken by a show of hands, recorded on the whiteboard
- 30 seconds of silence called verbally; journal written on a printed worksheet