Venezuela Current Events Activity with Working Wages and Food Prices

Make today's Venezuelan situation meaningful to your students by having them predict how many hours a minimum-wage Venezuelan worker must work to purchase basic necessities and their prices. Three Venezuelan families receive all net proceeds from this store.

Learn about their weekly purchases and help support them. We hope to provide weekly updates but their electricity and internet is spotty. Water comes to their homes only once a week, and when it does, all efforts are to store it and wash everything possible, not upload to the internet which can take hours to upload a three page document.

There are five student handouts in the PDF and the answers are in the PowerPoint and also available in PDF. This is fully editable because we are rushing to make this timely and there may be a few spelling typos which I hope you will privately share with me at minutebyminutespanish@gmail. com. I wasn't going to create any new activities because I have a new class to prep and it takes up all my time! But this info is so compelling that I want to share it and help these families to eat and pay for their children's medicines and education.

Here are the instructions:

You decide the order. You can do one a day or all at once in a class period. Students will need a calculator.

1. Hand out page four and explain the concept of minimum wage in Venezuela. While there are no exact statistics available, approximately 35% earn this – and then try to work other jobs for food. Student look at pictures of items purchased and try to guess how long one must work to purchase it.

2. Show the answers in the PowerPoint page 8.

3. Hand out page 3 and have students guess prices of February 6th. Have them practice using periods for commas and using ‘bs’ after the price rather than a dollar sign.

4. Show the answers in the PowerPoint page 6 or else with both hours and prices PowerPoint page 9.

5. Hand out page 5 and students predict prices from the previous week – talk about the government’s need to provide arroz y harina cheaply else more will starve. The military controls the food supply! Show the answers in PowerPoint page 12.

6. Repeat with pages six and seven for hours worked and prices from the following week.

We also have a free current events activity about water in Venezuela.

We have a $3.00 current events activity about the cost of education in Venezuela

If you are interested in Venezuela, you may like this song about immigrating to Colombia.

You may also be interested in the Venezuelan National Anthem Video and booklet.