Home
Learn
Read
Teach
Explore
Scholars’ Portal
Teach.
AdamSmithWorks Lesson Plans
AdamSmithWorks Lesson Plans
Original, classroom-ready activities to use with your students TODAY.
Is it Smith? Facts and Myths about the Life of Adam Smith
Using a trivia game, students explore common myths and less well-known facts about Adam Smith. Background information, questions for discussion, and resources for further exploration are included.
Adam Smith and the U.S. Constitution
In this lesson, students read and discuss an essay by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Douglass North. They learn how Adam Smith’s ideas influenced the thinking of the Founders who wrote the U.S. Constitution. Next, the students work in groups to do an exercise that involves a more in-depth discussion of the economic features of the Constitution using new examples.
Finding the Optimal Meal Plan
This lesson helps students to understand the importance of trade-offs and constraints in the context of planning what to eat for the week. A paired reading from Wealth of Nations helps learners practice reading complex texts and extension exercises apply the concept learned. This lesson is appropriate for at-home learning.
Division of Labor and the Wealth of Nations
Explore Adam Smith's pin factory, build mini sheds, and read
Wealth of Nations
to gain a better understanding of the division of labor. Adjustments to this lesson plan to make it appropriate for online teaching are included.
Division of Labor and the Future of Work
The aim of this game is to "build" a production chain with sounds and actions. Each student provides a single step in the production chain. This lesson plan includes material appropriate for online teaching.
Toilet Paper Wars!
This economics lesson is designed to be conversational and relies on materials in the home in order to accommodate parents thrust into an involuntary home learning environment as well as online educators.
What Would Adam Smith Say?
About greed? About morality?
Help students apply Adam Smith's ideas to contemporary issues. This lesson plan transfers well to online teaching.
Adam Smith's Potato Chips
Compare the pin factory from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations to a modern potato chip factory described in a podcast.
Explore with high school or introductory university students the way that the division of labor and changing market size have changed production over time.
On Whom Do You Depend?
How do we decide what to do for ourselves, and when to depend on others?
What Motivates Us?
Does Adam Smith contradict himself in his two major works???
In this lesson, the students test Smith’s ideas on sympathy by playing a famous game in economics and ethics known as the Ultimatum Game.
An Evening with the Wise Guys
Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, and David Hume
Over an imaginary dinner, the three discuss their views regarding economics and the relationship between Great Britain and the American colonies.
The Invisible Hand, Spontaneous Order, and a Pizza
How is an economy organized?
And what can Adam Smith- and a pizza- teach us?
Ghost Story
Newly elected American President Elizabeth Montgomery faces an economic crisis.
The night before her State of the Union address, she is visited by the ghosts of Smith and John Maynard Keynes.
Trade for the Win!
This lesson allows students to experience the benefits of trade that Adam Smith wrote about in
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Students participate in a trade simulation that measures the variation in benefits received (utility) in a variety of rounds from no trade to free trade.
To Protect or Not to Protect?
This lesson builds on the lesson Trade for the Win!
Dig deeper into the benefits of free trade in contrast to protected trade using two videos to contrast 18th-century trade with modern times. The extension to this lesson shows graphically how tariffs decrease the overall wealth/well-being of society.