Panoramic view of the Port of Santander

The cost of living

Educational justification

Students should be able to critically analyse and teachers must help and enable the students to do this; it is a fundamental priority for all areas of education. It is not good enough just to teach what things are, we should give the students the means to research, analyse, compare and review. This is the only way we can prepare individuals to go out into society with any kind of guarantee of success.

Piece of work linked to the following stage areas:

Knowledge of the surrounding area, Maths, Spanish language and Consumer Education.

Description of the work to be undertaken:

How?: Using the information we have collected at the fish market and the fishmongers, we're going to create some graphs so that, as a group in class, we can then compare, discuss and think about why there are price differences. We need to help the students understand and assess the role of middle-men in the whole productive process and the increase in price that this translates to the consumer. On page 25, there is a problem that will help the teacher work with the information that the students have collected.

It is important to bear in mind that a degree of subjectivity and practice are needed to be able to work with graphs, so there is no point in doing this activity if the students have never used this kind of graphical representation before. It is a good idea to do some practice runs with examples of problems and graphs using the simplest results.

Where?: In the classroom.

When?: After the visit. We should do some preparation work before the visit.

Using what?: Relevant activities.

Assessment: For the teacher to decide.

Activity objectives:

To give the students information that helps them to become critical and conscious members of the consumer society, as well as to teach them the ways in which consumer-related problems can be resolved.

To understand how the production-consumer system works.

To give students the tools needed for them to understand and carry out comparative analyses.

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