The Wishlist
Give your students a $5,000 budget, a town full of needs, and a week of decisions they will actually remember.
A whole town is counting on your third graders.
The Wishlist drops your students into a community council with a real budget and real trade-offs. Over five days they weigh resident requests, hit a mid-week emergency, and learn that good decisions come from honest reasoning, not lucky guesses. It is social studies they live, not a chapter they read.
See what your students get, and why it lands.
No mockups. Every page below is real, pulled straight from the files you download. Tap any one to see it full size.
A worksheet cannot do what a real decision does.
Your third graders are not circling answers about needs and wants. They are a town council with $5,000 and a stack of real requests: fix the streetlights, build the playground, repair the leaking roof. Every yes helps one neighborhood and lets another one down, and the money runs out fast. That is where the learning actually happens. Kids forget a worksheet. They remember the day they had to tell the dog park no so the school crosswalk could be safe.
Tap to read the resident requests
They are graded on their thinking, not on what they picked.
This is the part that surprises teachers. A council that funded the roof is not scored higher than a council that did not. There is no winning answer. Students are graded on the quality of their reasoning, written in their own daily reflection. A thoughtful choice that did not pan out beats a lucky one with no thinking behind it. That is how an eight year old begins to learn that how you decide matters more than whether you guessed right.
Tap to read the grading note
Let the workbook keep the money straight.
No third grader should lose the lesson because the subtraction got away from them. The Wishlist comes with a budget workbook that tracks every dollar for the team. They enter what they fund, and the budget remaining updates on its own. Their attention stays on the hard part, which neighborhood, which need, which trade-off, instead of on the math.
Tap to see the budget tracker
Five days, already planned. You just run the room.
You do not need to be an expert in budgets or behavior to teach this. The guide scripts your hardest moments, tells you what students will likely say, and gives you exactly how to respond, day by day. The roles, the town map, the emergency, and the Day 5 reveal are all written for you. You bring the facilitation. The mission brings everything else.
Tap to read the teacher guide
The lesson plan is already written.
Every simulation comes with a fully editable, admin-ready lesson plan. Standards alignment, daily pacing, learning objectives, differentiation, and an assessment plan are already done, so you can hand it to an administrator or adapt it to your district template in minutes.
Tap to preview the lesson plan
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Everything you need to run it.
- An admin-ready lesson plan. A fully editable plan with standards alignment, daily pacing, differentiation, and assessment, ready to adapt to your district template. Included with every purchase.
- Five daily playbooks that script every day, including the say-it-out-loud moments.
- A student budget workbook that tracks the $5,000 for each team automatically.
- Scenario cards, a town map, and resident requests that make the choices feel real.
- Daily reflection prompts and a simple rubric that grades thinking, not outcomes.
- Scaffolded student versions included for readers who need more support.
- Aligned to the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies (Communities, Geography, and History).
Bring The Wishlist to your classroom.
Five days, fully planned, and a week your students will not forget.
Get this simulationPreview real pages from the simulation before you spend a dollar. No guessing, no surprises.