Page 100 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

72 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
Lesson 7: Costs Associated with Your Shelter
General Purposes or Goals
To develop an understanding of and appreciation for the need to pay for a shelter/home and for modern conveniences such as purified water, energy/electricity, and fuel delivered to our homes, and an understanding of basic principles and choice options involved in buying or a renting shelter.
Main Ideas to Develop
• You can buy a house without having the full purchase price, although you can lose it if you do not continue to make your payments.
• Some people choose to live in an apartment temporarily while they save enough money for a down payment. Others choose apartments as permanent residences for other reasons such as convenience or fewer maintenance responsibilities.
• Banks (and sometimes private individuals) lend people the money to buy a house. The peo- ple have to pay back the amount of the loan plus interest. That is how banks make money.
• People have to pay to live in apartments. Some of the rent money goes to paying taxes
and some of it is kept by the owner of the building. Renting is intended to be a
profit-making business.
• Whether you live in a house or an apartment, you pay utility companies for heat (fuel),
water and light (electricity).
• You pay money to the government (taxes) to maintain roads, provide police
protection and fire protection and operate schools. (If you are buying your home, you pay taxes directly to the government. If you are renting, some of the money you pay to the apartment building owner goes to the government for these services.)
• A large part of the family income goes for buying or renting and maintaining the property.
Assessment
Have students write paragraphs focusing on costs associated with buying and renting. Why does buying a house take so much money? Write a short paragraph answering this question.
Why does renting an apartment take so much money? Write a short paragraph answering this question.
(Option: Students could draw and label their responses.)
Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.