How to Observe World Poverty Day in the Classroom

The United Nations officially declared October 17th World Poverty Day in 1987, and the organization has continued to raise the collective consciousness on this issue ever since. Follow these steps to bring enlightenment to the students in your classroom on this day.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

1. Define poverty and provide current statistics to demonstrate how poor people live. Show pictures of impoverished conditions to make sure that students understand the severity of poverty.
2. Create a fictitious economy in which all of the students are in poverty. Allow the levels of poverty to vary. Challenge the students to find legal and economical ways for everyone to rise from poverty by the end of the class period.
3. Advise each student to observe one component of their daily life that is wasteful. Ask them to maintain a learning log on how much of this item they waste over a week's time. For example, how often do they leave the water running with no purpose while they brush their teeth or get a glass of water.
4. Ask them to analyze how much money was lost by this wasteful habit. Provide a currency converter and let students convert the money lost into the currency of countries with high poverty rates.
5. In a graph, reflect how much more efficiently this money could be used in these other countries. Each student can adopt one of these countries by sending the "wasted" money to an organization that offers aid there.
6. Develop a service learning project to fight against poverty. Food and clothing drives are easy to organize, but allow the students to be creative.

Tips & Warnings

• Don't require the students to send money to any organization. Leave that to the discretion of the students and their parents.