Unit A
Activity 1

Feelings About Income Tax

To the Teacher:

This activity consists of written feelings and responses to stimulate discussion, and a simple writing activity.

Make one copy of each of the five pages of Feelings About Income Tax, and cut them up into thirteen Feeling slips and thirteen Response slips. Keep all the Feeling slips, and distribute the Response slips. Read Feeling #1 and ask for the students' own responses first, then for the student who has Response #1 to read the written response. When you are finished discussing this feeling, ask the students to sum it up in one word (sometimes this word is on the slip of paper, sometimes it isn't, e.g., confused). Write this word for all to see and copy down, under the heading Feelings about Income Tax. In this way you discuss each of the 13 feelings and responses. When you are finished, students can circle, check or underline each of the feelings that they feel.

If you don't want to discuss all 13 feelings, then leave out some in the middle, rather than leaving out the last ones. We say this because feelings 1 to 10 are negative; feeling 11 is neutral, and feelings 12 and 13 are positive. If you discuss only the first few feelings, you will not have any good ones to discuss.

Of course, you can use the Feeling/Response sheets in any other way that works for you and your students.

We have put this activity at the beginning of our unit because we recognize that some people's feelings will get in the way of studying income tax in a relaxed way. We feel that if we acknowledge and respond to potential feelings, it will clear the way for more productive engagement with the topic. The feelings we have included come from focus groups that we conducted with Literacy and Basic Skills learners in Ottawa, and from volunteer tax preparers in CCRA programs. Though we include here more negative feelings than positive ones, it was the positive ones that we heard more frequently in our focus groups, because many of the participants associated doing income tax with getting money back from the government.