Teach About Scarcity with “The Mitten”

Remind the students that scarcity is what occurs when there isn’t enough of something to meet the demand for it. In The Mitten there was a scarcity of space. Ask the students if they have ever experienced scarcity. Pose a couple of examples.

• How many people can go down a slide at one time?
• What if there are five people and only one cookie?

On chart paper, list some things that can be scarce across the top (to create columns). Call on the students to contribute to the list. You may need to prompt them-e.g., not enough places for people to live in a big city, not enough money, not enough food.

Now, in each column, ask the students to think of ways to solve these scarcity problems-e.g., build taller buildings, get a job, plant more crops, etc.

In the story The Mitten, you saw what happened as more and more animals moved into the mitten. In this lesson you will learn that sometimes there just isn’t enough of something to go around. When that happens, we call it a problem of scarcity. To cope with problems of scarcity, people often need to make changes.

In this lesson you will see an example of what happens when there is a problem of scarcity. You also will think about ways in which such problems might be avoided or fixed.

On the worksheet provided by your teacher, color the animals and the mitten. Cut out the mitten and glue the edges to a piece of construction paper. Then cut out animals and place them in the mitten–in the order which they entered the mitten in the story.

After you have put the animals into the mitten in the correct order, try this online activity designed to check your memory.

interactive activity

In big cities, when scarcity of space is a problem, what do people do to get more space? Does the city government require some people to leave? Does somebody see to it that taller buildings get built to house more people? Can you think of other possible solutions?

Can you think of other things besides space that might be scarce?

What might be done to solve these problems of scarcity?

View Interactive Activity

What do you think the animals in the story could have done to solve their scarcity problem in a different way?