The financial literacy of children is not given the attention it deserves. Many adults don’t even know how to handle their finances, and often find themselves in debt or living paycheck to paycheck. It’s time we start working on teaching kids about money now so they can make better decisions in the future. The good thing is it doesn’t have to be difficult – there are many financial literacy activities for elementary students you can use in class to teach them about money.
So let’s take a moment to talk about how you can teach your students about personal finance.
Simple Financial Literacy Activities For Elementary Students
Play money-related games such as “Monopoly” or “The Game of Life”
A fun and easy way to get your students interested in the world of finance is to play games. There are many board games and card games out there that revolve around money, and you can use them to establish a good relationship between students and finance.
Games such as Monopoly, The Game of Life, Payday, and Cashflow 101 offer great financial literacy activities for elementary students, and they can be a great tool to help them learn about money. You can ask your school’s guidance counselor or administration office if you have access to a copy of these, so you can use it during class time.
Now, to make sure they’re learning (and not just playing), you should accompany each of these games with a set of financial-related questions beforehand. That way, you can find out whether or not your students understand the different concepts behind money, and you can also gauge how much you should teach them.
Here’s a few example questions:
- What did you spend the most money on?
- Was it easy or hard to gain more money?
- How many times did you end up in bankruptcy?
- Did you end the game with more or less money than you began with?
With these questions in place, they’ll approach and review the games with more intent and ultimately, will think more productively about how they use money in general.
Have students write about their experiences with money – what they’ve saved up for, what they’ve spent their money on, etc.
It’s always smart to start with your student’s direct experiences. This lets them connect with the lessons in a more personal way, which will lead to better learning. You can have them write about what they’ve used their allowance on before, something they wanted but had to save up for to get, how they felt after spending a lot of money on something that wasn’t worth it, and so on.
The goal here is to get them to be more thoughtful about their purchases, and you can achieve that by getting them to think back on their experiences.
It’s also a good idea to have them share those experiences with the rest of the class, ideally by writing them down. You can also put up a classroom board where they can put their stories for everyone to see.
Have students create an imaginary budget for a superhero
One way to take a dry topic like budgeting is by relating it to a popular superhero. For instance, what would the budget of Spiderman be? Start by making a bullet list and having your students yell out ideas that you write down. That might look like this:
- Cloth for spider suit – $50 monthly
- Web fluid materials – $25 weekly
- Paper and pen for school – $35 monthly
- And so on
As the list builds up, you can point out how we don’t always realize how much money we need for all of our expenses, which is why it’s smart to keep track of everything. The goal of this activity is to show them that we all need money to buy things, and we should make sure that what we earn covers all of our costs.
Financial Literacy Is A Critical Skill For Students To Learn
It’s unfortunate that personal finance isn’t a mandatory course in most schools. The importance of being financially literate can’t be stressed enough, and knowing all the terms and ideas related to it is a key skill that students should have considering how much money will affect them in the future. But with these games and activities, you can make it fun for them to learn something that they think is boring to do.
Also, one more thing that will likely drastically affect their future is this – typing skills! You can help them improve their typing skills by using the amazing programs found at KeyboardingOnline today!