teaching Archives

Teaching Financial Literacy, Why is it Important?

Written by Nakisha Blain

Teaching financial literacy is crucial to a well-rounded education because money is security. If we skip teaching our kids about money, we set them up for unnecessary hardship later on in life.

What is Financial Literacy?

Financial literacy is understanding how money works and how to manage money.

Despite being able to summarize it in a sentence, teaching financial literacy, and learning about financial literacy is complex and often challenging.

We start learning about it from a young age by watching our parents and their money-spending habits.

Then we learn things in elementary school, like how to count coins and bills and make change. In high school math, we practice calculating interest and principal.

But even with all these lessons, the financial education of most people still needs to improve.

Teaching Financial Literacy: Parental Habits.

Whether you realize it or not, we start teaching financial literacy when our children are young by them observing how we use our money.

It starts with children observing our spending habits. I tell my children when the budget is getting low. And then I explain to them why I have to save the money we have left for bills or emergencies.

We can either support their learning of this or damage it. So, for example, when people give my kids money as gifts, I rarely let them go over their budget for things.

If they get $20 but want something that is $25, I do not give them the extra $5. So they have to pick something else or save their money for that $25 item.

By being firm with spending limits, I am teaching them to prioritize and do their best to make their money count. And I am constantly reminding them that they can choose to save their money, although they rarely make that choice.

Simply put, as parents, we are most responsible for modeling and reinforcing good money habits. However, we also need to show them how to prioritize and be happy living within their means.

Teaching Financial Literacy: Academics

Financial literacy is also full of academic skills.

In younger learners, that looks like learning to recognize coins and count them based on their value. In older kids, that may look like understanding and calculating interest. Both of these skills are covered in most math curricula.

However, there are other essential skills that are necessary for financial literacy that often aren’t covered in general math classes.

One example of that is saving for retirement. Did you know that depositing small amounts over a long period is more profitable than depositing large quantities over a short time?

Another example is amortization calendars. Many states require new homeowners to receive an amortization calendar from their mortgage company. It is a spreadsheet showing exactly how much interest and principal you will pay on each payment until the debt is repaid.

When you are choosing a curriculum for your financial literacy studies, it is essential to make sure they include critical, and also practical skills like balancing a checkbook, tracking spending budgeting, and saving for retirement.

Teaching Financial Literacy: Entrepreneurship.

Another essential piece of the financial literacy puzzle is understanding entrepreneurship. Building a business requires very different skills than managing a family’s finances. Including important lessons about entrepreneurship is important.

Check out the Entrepreneurship Special Interest Unit.

Entrepreneurship, Academic Skills.

Entrepreneurs must be able to raise capital, valuation, set prices, and evaluate return on investment.

While these seem like complex skills, even young children are capable of building successful businesses with help from their trusted adults.

Entrepreneurship, Character Traits

Entrepreneurship also teaches a lot of great character traits, too.

Patience

All young business owners must be patient while building their businesses. But, unfortunately, it takes a while for word to get out, even for the best products or the tastiest food.

Diligence

To build a successful business, one must work on it every day, even when you are tired or distracted. And in doing this, we can learn diligence and the satisfaction of doing something hard.

Social Skills

First, selling a product or providing a service means getting out there and interacting with people. So you have to learn how to get their attention and open up to you about what they want.

Second, working in a business is rarely done solo, so our young leaders will get first-hand experience working with people, organizing projects, and keeping people focused.

Third, it will allow our kids to practice celebrating hard work and experiencing failure. Both are experienced together when you are part of a business.

Problem-Solving and Critical Thinking Skills

The most important part of teaching financial literacy and entrepreneurship to kids is the benefits of their problem-solving skills.

By giving kids real problems to work on, you motivate them to try harder and work longer to solve their challenges.

Kids and Entrepreneurship

And while not all children will grow up to be entrepreneurs, their lessons can be life-changing even for a 9-5 employee. Things like hard work and problem-solving can have benefits that spill over into all parts of our lives.

Why Use a Curriculum?

A financial literacy curriculum will ensure you don’t miss essential skills like budgeting, balancing a checkbook, or reading an amortization calendar.

You will feel confident that you are working hard to ensure no gaps in their education and that you are doing your best to provide them with an excellent education and set them up for success.

And Schoolio has you covered for affordable financial literacy unit studies for grades 3, 4, 5, and 8.

Conclusion

Teaching our kids about financial literacy is a long process that takes years and years instead of days or weeks.

It’s very important that we be good role models and stewards of our money, because our children will learn more from watching us than they can from academic exercises.

However, academic exercises are also essential to ensure they get a rigorous and diverse education, whether they are just managing their family’s finances or a business.

We’d love to hear from you; what topics do you want to see in our next financial literacy course?

Book a Concierge Call.

If you aren’t sure how to get started or what programs would best suit your child’s learning needs, then you can chat with one of our experts on a one-on-one Concierge Call, completely free!
Click here to book a Concierge Call.

Teaching Multi-Grades? Schoolio Can Give You Your Life Back.

By Chelsea McLeod

Teaching multiple grades

Look familiar? Are you spending all your spare time doing prep that seems neverending to keep up? Are you overwhelmed with student needs and classroom outcomes? Are you struggling with teaching multi-grades?

Let me paint you a picture. You teach in a rural area; your school is K-12, and each homeroom is multi-graded. Some grades only have 1 or 2 kids, so while you may only have a class of 8-10 students, you have four grades at once and hundreds of outcomes to cover and assess. So not only do you have to try to differentiate for student interest, but you also must plan, teach, assess and grade the outcomes from each separate curriculum.

You teach several grades simultaneously, unlike your friends who work in nearby larger city centers, but you are given equal prep time. Therefore, much of your work comes home because even if there isn’t time in the school day, these things need to get done. So once you are home, you are taking time away from your family or hobbies to keep up with your day-to-day classroom duties. If this rings true for you, then Schoolio can help give you your life back.

While many still consider teaching a calling, the shift in the last several years to an outcomes-based system has put more pressure on the Teacher. Teaching these days is an endless cycle of being in demand. You are lecturing, working one-on-one with students, meeting seemingly arbitrary administrative deadlines, attending meetings, responding to emails, communicating with parents, collaborating with co-teachers, etc.

The list of responsibilities given to teachers in the classroom is unrealistic; these are on top of the duties of running the classroom day-to-day and keeping your students engaged. Then we add on the testing, assessments, marking, and report cards required for each student in your class, in many cases the stress of teaching multiple grades. This can be for as many as 25+ students.

Teaching is Work. Give Yourself Some Grace and Help. Especially when Teaching Multi-Grades.

The expectation of Teachers does not create nor support a healthy work-life balance, but for many, it is the reality.

So you spend your days in a cycle that looks like a hamster in a wheel. Teaching all day, putting out fires with students, communicating with parents, meeting all deadlines for administration and keeping your head above water only to go home and spend your evening planning, prepping and working on tomorrow, like in the picture above. This is a lot; this is an astronomical task you take on as a classroom teacher. While these responsibilities are genuine for all classroom teachers, imagine that you have a multi-graded classroom.

This not only changes the dynamic with the students but also adds to the Teacher’s workload. You now have all the above responsibilities and the added pressure of 2, 3, or 4 sets of outcomes. This is what it can be like if you are in a rural school, sometimes teaching 3 to 4 grades simultaneously. This was not always the case; several years ago, it was the norm to teach the curriculum in an even/odd schedule in many rural settings.

Teaching multiple grades

This meant that if you had a grade 3/4/5/6 class, you would teach all the curriculum for grades 4 & 6 one year and the next, you would cover the curriculum for grades 3 & 5. This was a seemingly more manageable way to approach a multi-grade classroom. However, in our current education climate, this is no longer an allowable approach by many school divisions, and therefore Teachers, especially those with 3-4 grades, are feeling overwhelmed and overworked. The expectation of Teachers does not create nor support a healthy work-life balance, but for many, it is the reality. And while this can seem like an unrealistic expectation, the students still need to learn at their appropriate level. So now what?

Save Your Time, Money and Your Sanity

For starters, if you teach in this situation, you must prioritize your time and prep. Not only for yourself but for your students as well because “you cannot pour from an empty cup,” and if we spend all of our free time on work, it will lead to burnout. I can tell you for sure that you do not need to spend time creating all of your resources; your time is precious, and there are only 24 hours in a day. Not everything your students do, learn or complete needs to be unique.

There used to be a time when teaching was a “one-size-fits-all,” and all teachers were given the same guide. This is a time-consuming task for teachers with only 1 grade, but you have 3, 4 or even 5? You cannot be expected to use all your resources or put that much pressure on yourself, and relying on Teachers Pay Teachers for everything can get expensive, especially because sometimes it’s difficult to purchase only 1 or 2 lessons.

For example, if you have grades 3, 4, and 5, it can get pretty pricey to purchase one entire unit for all three grades and if there are 10-12 units in a year for just one subject… You get the idea. An extra expense with each purchase. Way too much! Which is on top of the fact that teachers already spend more out of pocket than other professions.

How Schoolio Can Give You Your Life Back…

There is no limit to the number of students you can add, the courses you have access to or the learning that will take place!

Schoolio has created resources for each grade level, and you can mix and match them to best support your student’s needs. You do not have to buy entire units for one or two valuable lessons. The lessons have been created by certified teachers and are available online for a monthly per-student cost.* You can simultaneously use more than one grade at a time, focussing on student needs, interests or passions.

There is a suggested content planner for the year you can use, or you can create your own and keep track of progress for all your students. You can try it risk-free, with no required credit card and “Learn, plan, and personalize all in one place” with 4000+ interactive math, language, science, and social studies lessons. There is no limit to the number of students you can add, the courses you have access to or the learning that will take place! Try it now; you won’t regret it. And you won’t believe the extra free time you will have now that you aren’t trying to do it all yourself, especially when teaching multi-grades.

Tag: teaching

Teaching Financial Literacy