Uncover the Principles of How to Teach Children About Money

Here’s an example of how these resources helped someone turn her desire for teaching kids financial literacy into reality:

Elizabeth Kenny, a retired seventh-grade teacher, wanted to know how to teach children about money so she could start a program in her community. Having taught elementary school for more than 30 years, she had a good understanding of her audience and knew she wanted to bring financial education to the 400 middle schoolers in her home town. However, she lacked a few critical pieces of information about how to reach out to schools and parents, refine her teaching goals, and clarify the curriculum and delivery mode she would use.

By gathering information through informal interviews with some parents and teachers she knew, Mrs. Kenny discovered that her community had a strong drive to Teach Children About Money. To get the ball rolling, one teacher received her principal’s approval to invite Mrs. Kenny to present a two-hour workshop to the 25 students in her seventh-grade math class.

Her initial objective was to explore how to teach children about money with a group of 25 seventh-graders. Since she knew parents were interested in their children receiving an introduction to personal finances, and because the time available was limited to two hours, she was OK with just covering some basic financial education concepts for the first program. Her hope was to present more comprehensive training to all the middle schoolers in her community later.

For the first workshop, Mrs. Kenny set a goal of teaching kids about money focused on helping them reach Level 1 on Webb’s Depth of Knowledge Scale and the Understanding level on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Higher-order Thinking Skills, where they could recall and understand some introductory information about personal finances.

Once Elizabeth understood her short-term objectives and long-term vision, her next focus was to decide on the delivery modes for how to teach children about money. She decided her initial program would be timeline-based, because it was limited to a two-hour workshop; and she would deliver the lessons via in-person instruction during math class, as she and the teacher had arranged.

Her next step to Teach Children About Money was to identify the subjects on which to focus the class. Since the parents in her community had said they just wanted their kids to gain some basic knowledge about money management, she decided to focus the workshop around the topics of financial psychology and savings. Because she was working with seventh-grade students in a two-hour time frame, Mrs. Kenny decided she could best meet her goal of exposing the children to money management skills if she limited the topics she covered to identifying wants vs. needs, motivation to learn about money, the importance of saving, and the power of compounding interest.

Next, Elizabeth needed to find a qualified educator to present her program – one with proven skills in both content knowledge and teaching ability. She wanted to present the workshop herself, so she needed to go through some training personally. She decided to complete the NFEC’s Certified Financial Education Instructor coursework. Because she already had a background as a middle school educator, she just wanted to strengthen her understanding of how to teach children about money.

When choosing a curriculum to Teach Children About Money, Mrs. Kenny wanted practical lessons that would help the kids understand the basic concepts and relate them to their own lives. She wanted something that would fit into her two-hour time frame and that was age-appropriate for seventh-graders. She accomplished this by choosing curriculum with a flexible, modular design that could be tailored to meet any schedule; and that used practical, action-based lessons age-appropriate for children at the grade 7 level.

Of the 25 students in the math class for Mrs. Kenny’s first attempt to Teach Children About Money, 24 were in class that day and completed the course, with an average improvement of 15% on a short pre- and post-test test that measured fundamental knowledge about the topics she covered. Mrs. Kenny then compiled the data and produced a brief report to share with the teacher and the students’ parents. Her reason for preparing the report was to demonstrate program impact on student knowledge, thereby gathering support for expanding the workshop to reach other students at the middle school.  She also wanted the data for herself to evaluate how to teach financial literacy to children could help them as they mature.