Big Idea: Financial Literacy

Making financial plans to earn and spend money for a purpose

Choice of context - Own job OR Earning money for an End of Year trip

Expectations:

Financial Literacy

• F1. demonstrate the knowledge and skills needed to make informed financial decisions

  • F1.3 design sample basic budgets to manage finances for various earning and spending scenarios

Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) Skills and the Mathematical Processes

• A1. Throughout this grade, in order to promote a positive identity as a math learner, to foster well-being and the ability to learn, build resilience, and thrive, students will apply, to the best of their ability, a variety of social-emotional learning skills to support their use of the mathematical processes and their learning in connection with the expectations in the other five strands of the mathematics curriculum.

In this lesson, to the best of their ability, students will learn to think critically and creatively and maintain positive motivation and perseverance as they apply the mathematical processes of communicating (express and understand mathematical thinking, and engage in mathematical arguments using everyday language, language resources as necessary, appropriate mathematical terminology, a variety of representations, and mathematical conventions), so they can recognize that testing out different approaches to problems and learning from mistakes is an important part of the learning process, and is aided by a sense of optimism and hope.

Materials

• Context A - Own job

Own Job - Appendix B- Template with questions for income

or Own Job - Appendix B - Template with questions for income.pdf

• Context B- End of year trip

Information for teachers or Information for teachers.pdf

• Information leaflets or website of the place selected for the end of year outing

Trip - Appendix B - Template with questions for Income

Or Trip - Appendix B - Template with questions for Income.pdf

• Chart Paper

• Markers

• Calculators

• Computers (if necessary to research)

Online/Hybrid Materials

• Starting Learning - Jamboard - Have you ever saved money for something?

teacher background

Students should be able to explain the relationship between spending and saving, and describe how spending and saving behaviours may differ from one person to another (Grade 4 F1.4)

Gallery Walk - Have students look at the work of other groups and find ideas that are similar to or different from their own.

Have students share their work in either a Google Slides or Jamboard and in a virtual meeting students can take turns sharing their ideas in either the whole group meeting or in breakout rooms.

For the “Own job” scenario:

• What did different groups identify as “Needs” or “Wants”? Is there disagreement about what those words mean?

• Look at the assumptions other groups have made. Do you agree or disagree with their ideas (i.e., types of jobs, how much money they could make, how often they could work, etc)?

For the “Class trip” scenario:

• Looking at all that you have gathered in information, is this trip realistic?

• Do we have enough time to collect the full amount to complete the trip?

• Would it be better to review our needs and desires for this outing?

For both scenarios:

• Identify with students the ideas they agree on, and identify questions that remain

• How could these questions be settled? What research can the class do? What are our next steps?

Discuss with students where the math is in this plan.

• Up-front costs would require borrowing money (and represent a negative amount in your plan)

• For trip - a school bus costs a flat amount, but admission to museum is per student

• For job - there may be variables that can’t be planned for, such as how many times a month you can babysit, how often it snows, etc.

Opportunities for Differentiation

• Organising students in groups/ pairs for research

• Guiding students’ thinking through questioning

• Sharing tasks in the groups according to students’ abilities

• Give extra time as needed

• Give time limits for research

• More frequent check-ins as students gather information

• Calculator use

Opportunities for Assessment

Formative assessment

• (For own job) Can students differentiate between Needs and Wants and identify reasons to earn money?

• Can students identify unknowns in their plan, make conjectures and estimates, and identify steps to take?

• Can students collect data, identify reasonableness of their plan, revise their estimates?

Summative Assessment:

Opportunities for summative assessment will come in the follow up lesson(s), as you can see if students can

• Gather needed information

• Create a realistic plan

• Anticipate problems and possible solutions

Do research/ ask questions to gather the information you need to finalize your plan (individually, in groups or whole class).

• Investigate using spreadsheets to keep track of a budget. See this lesson, Budgets and Spreadsheets: Making plans

• Note: This can remain theoretical (imagining how students might in the future earn money) or could be an on-going project in your class (earning money for a trip/ classroom economy*).

*Note: We are using the phrase “Classroom economy” to refer to any type of system a teacher may have to earn points or “money” by contributing to the class (jobs, behaviour, etc.) and to “spend” that on items or privileges (free time, fancy pencils etc.).

With support, students might:

• make a proposal to School Administration or School Parent Council to borrow money for materials/ ingredients needed

• decide on their roles and responsibilities

• buy materials/ ingredients and make what they will sell

• advertise products/ services to the school or school community

• deal with challenges/ setbacks to attain goals