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Find financial literacy activities

Find activities that can help you teach and nurture the building blocks of financial capability across the curriculum.

These classroom activities can be completed within a single class period. Each activity comes with a teacher guide and supporting student material, so it’s easy to implement whether you’re an experienced personal finance teacher, integrating financial literacy into another subject area, or supplementing your existing financial education curriculum.

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Showing 13 matches out of 251 activities

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Buying things
Elementary school (K-1)
Elementary school (2-3)

  • Coloring your savings

    Updated

    Ideal for: Elementary school (K-1)

    Students color pictures of dollar bills to show how much they’d need to save to buy different items.

    Key information

    Topic:
    Save and invest (Saving for short-term goals), Spend (Buying things)
    Activity duration:
    15-20 minutes

    Building block

    • Financial habits and norms

  • Exploring ways we use money

    Updated

    Ideal for: Elementary school (K-1)

    Students listen to scenarios about using money, move to one corner of the room or another to identify what people in the scenario were doing (saving, spending, earning, borrowing), and discuss the example.

    Key information

    Topic:
    Earn (Making money), Save and invest (Saving for long-term goals, Saving for short-term goals), Spend (Buying things), Borrow (Getting loans)
    Activity duration:
    15-20 minutes

    Building block

    • Financial habits and norms
    • Financial knowledge and decision-making skills

  • Flying into spending and saving

    Updated

    Ideal for: Elementary school (2-3), Elementary school (4-5)

    Students fly a paper airplane they’ve created to targets that represent amounts of money saved or spent and track their results.

    Key information

    Topic:
    Save and invest (Saving for long-term goals, Saving for short-term goals), Spend (Buying things)
    Activity duration:
    45-60 minutes

    Building block

    • Executive function
    • Financial habits and norms

  • Making smart money trades

    Updated

    Ideal for: Elementary school (2-3)

    Students listen to a story about making money trades and determine whether the values of different groups of coins and paper money are equal or unequal.

    Key information

    Topic:
    Protect (Managing risk), Spend (Buying things)
    Activity duration:
    45-60 minutes

    Building block

    • Financial habits and norms
    • Financial knowledge and decision-making skills

  • Making spending choices

    Updated

    Ideal for: Elementary school (K-1), Elementary school (2-3)

    Students listen to a Money Monster story about getting a pet and then discuss spending choices.

    Key information

    Topic:
    Spend (Buying things)
    Activity duration:
    45-60 minutes

    Building block

    • Executive function
    • Financial habits and norms
    • Financial knowledge and decision-making skills
Activities align with the My Money Five principles introduced by the statutorily created federal Financial Literacy and Education Commission.