Teaching personal financial literacy to elementary students

             I’ll be honest…when I first read about Personal Financial Literacy being added to our state’s standards I was puzzled. I mean, really? The government wants us to teach about being financially responsible?!?! The irony is not lost on me.

            However, after I read through the standards, I realized that they were pretty reasonable. The standards in Texas require us to teach about savings, borrowing, lending, and making deposits and withdrawals. The problem is how to fit them into our already busy schedule.

            After a lot of thought, I thought that these standards would serve as a much needed review of money and basic math operations.

We began our Personal Financial Literacy with a basic money review…

   We then moved on to discussing saving and spending. We used coins to do this (continuous money review). We crossed out what was spent and circled what was saved.

We used charts and looked for patterns when calculating savings over time.

We made a foldable picture to serve as a reminder of the difference between a deposit and withdrawal.

We solved word problems involving deposits and withdrawals.

          One of the most interesting class conversations we had during this unit was over lending money. Things we discussed were:

• ·        What things have you let people borrow?
• ·        Why would you let people borrow those things? Why not?
• ·        What makes a person a good borrower?
• ·        What makes a person a bad borrower?
• ·        Why do you think a bank would consider a person a good borrower?
• ·        Why do you think a bank would consider a person a bad borrower?

The FREEBIE below is a great way to begin your Personal Financial Literacy unit! I hope that you can use it in your classroom.

Personal Finance and Money Unit FREEBIE

The complete Personal Finance Unit – No Prep can be found below.

Personal Finance and Money Unit - No Prep

Integrating Reading into Science

            Reading is a BIG part of primary grades. In order for students to be better readers, it is important that we integrate reading into ALL of our subjects. Reading and comprehending informational texts is crucial. Students have to be able to read nonfiction and obtain information. Science is an easy subject to incorporate reading. We are currently learning about the Solar System. We are reading informational texts about the different bodies in space. We are learning and practicing our reading and comprehension skills at the same time!

The samples from the picture above can be found in my “Exploring the Solar System No-Prep Unit.”

Exploring the Solar System No - Prep Unit

Below is a sample of one of my most downloaded FREEBIES! It comes with informational texts about the sun along with a sorting activity for the planets.

Solar System FREEBIE