By: Michael Golder
What do you remember learning about personal finance during your own K-12 schooling? My guess is not too much. How often do you hear students utter the phrase “Why are we learning this?” Likely more than once. Well here is a program that introduces the basics of personal finance to middle schoolers. Useful, relevant, real-life topics to start their journey toward understanding money and the role it plays in our lives.
I feel we have an opportunity while kids are in school to tackle these topics to hopefully increase the overall level of financial literacy of high school graduates. I have created an 18 lesson program aimed toward the middle school group (Grades 6, 7, 8) with the ultimate goal of expanding to include grades 9-12. The resource includes detailed instructions for each lesson, an accompanying video series and age appropriate activities for each topic as well as ideas for extensions to deepen student learning. The lesson outlines and videos are available on the Middle School Money Matters Google site and YouTube channel respectively (links below).
Check out the 3 Minute Thesis video below for a brief overview of the project.
3 Minute Thesis Video
GOOGLE SITE
https://sites.google.com/sd61learn.ca/middleschoolmoneymatters/home
YOUTUBE CHANNEL
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxgFrXGxQ3PUW1KxcehXWOA
**Google Site and YouTube Channel are still works in progress.
Wow! This is a great project topic and your video is very professional looking. Your project also looks wonderful! It is easy to follow and the set-up of the lessons are great! I like how you incorporate different learning styles in your lessons by having video, hands-on, and text to learn the information. I also think it is very important to use real-world applications like you have done. It appears that your project is written for educators to use when teaching students about financial literacy…I think a great extension of this would be to adapt it to make it a resource that students could go through independently online.
Great feedback. Yes, turning it into something students could work through independently, I like that idea.
Michael this topic, your knowledge and the practical application of your project, AMAZING! I was watching with my siblings, both teachers, and all 3 of us are looking forward to using your program to support our own teaching and learning of financial literacy.
The grade 6, lesson 3 on budgeting has so many cross-curricular ties to science and even social studies. I love that each lesson/component is succinct, bite sized and holds so many opportunities for exploration or further inquiry.
Can I share this at our next middle school staff meeting?
Absolutely, feel free to share. I’m happy to send you the whole resource with lessons and activities in PDF format if you like, you can email me at mgolder@sd61.bc.ca . Keep in mind it’s still not quite done and being edited here and there and I have a few videos still to add to grade 7 and 8.
Great work sir! This topic is sadly overlooked and addressing financial literacy at a young age is long overdue… Great work on the presentation. Which project did you use to do the video editing so you could do it in short segments instead of straight through with 3 min of continuous recording? I tried so many times to go straight through the full 3 min recording but every time there was a little screw up I wish I could edit out… 🙂 Please continue your great work and push through with the senior high content – very important work to do – as a parent, THANK YOU for your work and commitment to improving our education system and reources.
Thanks Chris, I just used Imovie which is pretty straightforward. I’m no editing expert, but you are right, I just shot it in like 15-30 second segments and then cut them together. It’s way easier to just do a couple of sentences with no mistakes than to try to make it through the whole 3 minutes.
This is such a great topic! Financial literacy is one of my favorite units that I cover with my grade 8s. I really enjoy when they say, “Hey, when are we going to learn something useful like taxes” and I’m able to say just wait! I appreciate that you are also coming at it from a perspective of educating teachers as well. So many people feel that they are “bad at math”.
Great work!
Feel free to use any of the videos, also if you are interested I’m happy to send out the entire resource package to you if you like, I’m sure there are at least a couple of things your grade 8s would find interesting. The listed grade levels are more of a suggestion too, I’m currently running through the entire program from grade 6 lesson 1 all the way to grade 8 lesson 6 (combining a couple of lessons here and there) with 3 grade 8 classes at my school and they seem to be enjoying it. If you want the package feel free to email me at mgolder@sd61.bc.ca and I can send it to you in PDF.
Wow, financial literacy is exactly what students a that age need and what I think many of us wish we had at that age! I very much look forward to your resource. I wonder if in addition to the lesson plans for teachers, would including a student resource be supportive. The first thought that came to mind was creating an app that students can use with their first job, after the unit plans were completed. The app could allow students to keep track of where their money is going, and there could be reminder alerts for them or notifications that said, good job, if you put $$$$ away every paycheck in 5 years you will have $$$$$, or a count-down to the cost of a large ticket item, maybe a vehicle, so they can see how close or far away they are getting, or something like that? I cant wait to see what you come up with, thank you.
Thank you. Yes I hope to continue it into high school where the topics get more interesting and challenging. “The True cost of owning a vehicle” is the title of one of my proposed lessons for high school.
Hi Michael, I am so blown away by how much you have done on your design-project since last year when it was an idea forming into a proposal. It is clear this is a much needed resource for teachers, do you have a strategy for sharing/distributing it?
Thanks Wendy, I presented the resource at the Tapestry conference last month in Victoria and gave the lesson plan booklet and all the activities to all the participants. Feedback was positive. Right now I’m just giving it out to whoever wants it. If someone actually ends up thinking it’s worthwhile and uses it in their class that’s great. If that positive word of mouth leads somewhere, ever better. Ultimately I would love to partner with an organization like Junior Achievement to build this resource up to include high school as well, then JA could still offer their expert delivered lessons, but also have a teacher resource as well that I would be co-author of…kind of a pipedream, but who knows? Also wordpress still does not let me update my profile so on all my posts it just lists my student number, just so you are aware if you or Rachel is keeping track.
Hi Michael,
Such a great topic and execution, I really enjoyed reading through all your lesson plans and watching the videos. I have worked with JA through planning and CLE/CLC courses and think your lessons are a great supplementary resource. I love the cross-curricular aspect of majority of the lessons, often times I have found the mindset of others to be “its not my area to teach” when speaking about financial literacy, and it becomes like you said a very daunting task for a single educator. However, they way you have designed your lessons are great as they relate to multiple subject ares! I feel this would greatly help CLE/CLC teachers as students would have some prior knowledge, and can see the relevance to all aspects of their lives!
Awesome Job!
Monique
Hi Michael!
Wow, this is an excellent resource. I have talked at length with fellow colleagues about how to incorporate financial literacy into our everyday Math lessons. This is just the sort of resource I have been looking for. I look forward to looking at it in more detail. I love the cross-curricular potential and the way you have easily chunked the lessons. The videos are an awesome component as well, thanks for sharing!
Great resource Michael. I enjoyed your video. I agree financial literacy is needed and the earlier the better. I like the way lessons include videos and interactive hands on lessons. I would love to share this with my district. I look forward to seeing the final product.
Great job Michael! Such a useful resource! I taught math for a few years and the most engaging (and in my opinion most important) unit was when we partnered with Junior Achievement and had some great speakers come in and discuss financial literacy. When the unit was over I would occasionally show 20 minute episodes of “Till Debt Do Us Part” and my students loved them. Reminds me of the memes we see going around every year at this time: “I’m sure glad I learned about parallelograms instead of how to do taxes. It’s really come in handy this parallelogram season”. Well done!
This is a great idea. It’s never too soon too start financial planning, and giving kids those tools early on makes sense.
Thanks Mike,
I attended your explanation during our breakout time. I am sure people leaving had nothing to do with the aggregate attractiveness of the room. I like the idea of making more of our curriculum more practical and relatable to student that has a clear purpose for the future, not just in financial literacy, but also changing the PE curriculum to adjust it more to skills that students would use as adults to stay active and healthy.