Trying to introduce the ideas of Communism and Capitalism to students can be tricky, but necessary if you’re going to try and teach the Cold War.
I’d got the idea of getting students to work out how much money they had in their pockets, and how they would be affected by a switch to communism from this thread on the always brilliant schoolhistory.co.uk forum.
In order to make everything go a bit quicker, I’ve put together this spreadsheet. You get each student to call out how much they’ve got and it calculated class total, mean and medium average, and how many people would be better / worse off under communism [1. In theory]
This can lead on to discussions about what the trade off would be (lack of freedom) and if it was worth it. From there, we can move on and talk about events.
It’s here if it’s of any use to you!