#financiallteracy

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Developing Students' Financial Literacy Muscles

This year I have been writing a column on Multiple Literacies for The Australian Education Times. The readers are mostly students (middle school

Financial Literacy

This article by Anne Shaw (2015) looks at Financial Literacy and how it can be applied in the classroom to contribute to the growth of this literacy in 21st century learners. Shaw (2015) states that, “Financial literacy is the ability to understand how money works in the world: how someone manages to earn or make it, how that person manages it, how he/she invests it (turns it into more) and how that person donates it to help others.” As a result, activities should hit each of these targets throughout the learning process, to ensure that understanding of all aspects of the literacy are being met and built upon. 

This link is a wonderful starting point for teachers that are new to the concept of financial literacy or struggle to find activities that facilitate creative opportunities for learning, as it offers a break-down of what financial literacy is, why it is important, as well as several different activities that can be used in the classroom under the categories of earning, spending, saving, investing or giving away money. 

The activity that most intrigued me from this article was in the context of earning money in the way of starting up a small business like a “lunch cart,” in which high school students sought to find a way to keep students from leaving school during lunch and not returning back to campus. These students succeeded by partnering up with local restaurants to run a food cart on campus, serving items like fresh burritos and sandwiches which worked to keep students from leaving campus during lunch and simultaneously helped the working students accumulate a tidy profit. As a result of this group project, students not only were able to make a positive contribution to their community, but they were benefitting from the construction and execution of this lunch cart project that facilitated in building on their financial literacy skills which includes earning, spending and perhaps saving or giving away money after the completion of their sales to students and payments to business owners. 

References: 

Ball, A. (2003). Many models of empowerment: Students make a business of learning. Edutopia. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/students-make-business-learning

Shaw, A. (2015). Developing students’ financial literacy muscles. LinkedIn.  Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/developing-students-financial-literacy-muscles-anne-shaw?trk=mp-reader-card