Introduction

This course outline is designed for condensed learning programs for financial literacy, usually taking place over the summer. Enrichment programs can vary in length, but our benchmark for pacing is a 3-week program that meets for approximately 2 hours a day, 5 days a week.

With student packets that can be easily shared with your students! And teacher grading rubrics too.

In the outline below, you will find a breakdown of activities for each day, along with the approximate time commitment. Many activities can be used either as a lecture/presentation/class discussion (and include a slide deck to get started), or as individual activities with an online lesson and associated pop quiz.

All materials can be utilized both in person or online to suit a variety of blended or remote learning experiences.

Notice for teachers joining our Free Financial Literacy Events – Our free events do not have full admin access for teachers – all settings are enabled with our recommended settings. You can skip our guides on course set-up and dive straight into the Unit Outlines and Teacher Packets!

General Course Structure

The course is divided into 5 units on a different aspect of financial literacy, largely aligned to the Jumpstart™ national standards.:

1. Investing
2. Budgeting
3. Credit and Debt
4. Careers and Income
5. Risk and Insurance

The course begins with a pre-test assessment to measure student baseline understanding, before beginning each of the sub-units. Each day of the course starts with a recap of the previous day, with additional challenge questions to foster discussion and solidify learning. At the conclusion of each sub-unit, there are short assessments to measure understanding before continuing on.

Buffer time is built into the course outline to allow flexibility for students with different learning needs, with time set aside each day to progress through the PersonalFinanceLab™ budget and stock games for a complete experiential learning experience. The course concludes both with a summary of experiences from both games, and a post-test to measure outcomes compared to the pre-test at the start of the course.

What Is Different from The Longer Course Outlines?

This course outline is a condensed form of our other course outlines designed for quarter- or semester- long classes. Due to the condensed nature of enrichment programs, the overall content is roughly the same load as our 9-week course outline, but with additional time spent on in-class activities, videos, and discussion points.

In terms of course content, ordering, and pacing, the biggest change is that our Investing unit is moved to the front of the course. This is because giving students a hands-on component with the PersonalFinanceLab™ stock game is a cornerstone of our investment learning experience, and it is important to have as long of a trading period as possible to allow students to have the maximum exposure to how events in the real world can impact their portfolio.

In a typical 9- or 18- week course, we also recommend teachers close their class stock game before the end of the class so students can prepare final reports and presentations. In our enrichment program outlines, we recommend teachers extend the stock game beyond the end of the program, giving students the opportunity to continue to watch their portfolio grow (and practice investing strategies and research themselves) beyond the end of the course.

Setting Up Your Class

PersonalFinanceLab is highly customizable for your class. However, to make the most of our recommended projects, we encourage teachers to use the following settings when setting up their class (these settings are specific to this 9-week course outline):

Budget Game

• Set up a 12-month game, where students are “Part Time” for the first 6 months, “Full Time” for the last 6 months (we include a “midpoint review” project that hinges on this transition). Budgeting starts in the 2nd unit of the game, and the course outline sets aside time to complete up to 12 months over the course of the enrichment program.
• Do NOT enable speed limits for your session. As the course session is quite short, speed limits would interfere with the daily course progression.
• You can use our pre-sets for bill expenses or choose settings more directly related to your area. However, confirm at the preview at the bottom of the screen that students should be able to save 10% of their income each month.

Stock Game

• Create your stock game by giving students $10,000 of initial cash.
• After your class has been set up and students have registered, utilize our Teams feature to organize your class into groups of 2 or more students per team. This will allow students to place their own trades, while aggregating team portfolios.

Our last recommended activity for the class involves each group making a 5-minute presentation to the class, and so we recommend you adjust your group sizes accordingly to allow all groups present in the same day at the end of class.

Your Assignments

Each unit outline has our recommended assignment tasks. The class begins with a pre-test and ends with a post-test, and the course outline specifies our recommended assigned tasks for each day.

Instead of having a single assignment for each day, we recommend grouping each of the 5 units in to their own “Assignment”, which students will complete over the course of 2-3 days (and give students who need more time a chance to catch up). You can find out more about creating assignments at our admin guide here.

Getting Help

If you have any questions about setting up your enrichment session, or would like a walkthrough on the specific needs for your school or program, you can connect with our account management team using the “Live Chat” on this page, or emailing info@personalfinancelab.com for more information.

We are looking forward to working with you soon!

Pricing

Depending on your class size, we have discounts available for summer enrichment programs! Please leave your details below to hear from our sales team: