What a Month!
Well, we've certainly covered a lot of ground over the past 30 days during Financial Literacy Month, haven't we? From mutual funds and lemonade stand logistics to kick-starting your own start-up and investing in your favorite company, we've covered the four cornerstones of Financial Literacy in exciting, engaging, and easy-to-implement ways. From Personal Finance and Economics to Entrepreneurship and Investing, FUTURES: Financially Literate Kids for a Financially Literate Society™ is the groundbreaking Financial Literacy Program that empowers students BEFORE High School—to achieve their best success AFTER High School.
Ariel Education Initiative is founded upon the belief that Financial Literacy is a critical 21st-century skill and is vital to our kids, our society, and our future. That’s why AEI developed FUTURES: Financially Literate Kids for a Financially Literate Society™ and that is also why this program is 100% /free.
The goal of FUTURES is to provide a robust financial education program for kids—in school and beyond. Whether it be learning to invest in securities, such as stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, the fundamentals of becoming an entrepreneur or conducting a cost/benefit analysis or credit, this program offers learners the chance to shape their own point of view that will empower them to make wise money choices—long into their futures.
Beyond the Blog
These blog posts can only provide a glimpse of how FUTURES simplifies and deconstructs complicated, intricate Financial Literacy concepts to make them relevant and easier to understand for students. With the full FUTURES program at your fingertips, you can you’re your kids better understand the complicated world of finance AND develop their own personal stake in it. Created by teachers for teachers, this proven educational program is FREE and readily available to districts, schools, teachers, coaches, counselors, and families, too!
FUTURES encourages kids to develop and form this own point of view of finance and investing, while honing their critical thinking skills as they progress through the depth and breadth of the four strands and 29 stand-alone sections of the program.
Real-time, real-world connections drive kids’ interest and create effective links between academic content and the business world. This unique multi-disciplinary approach elevates learning, allowing educators, school districts, and families and community centers to help prepare tomorrow’s leaders—today—so they can compete in and become strong leaders of our ever-changing global marketplace—in their futures.
Four Cornerstones of Financial Literacy
The FUTURES™ program guides students from kindergarten through eighth grade, starting with a basic and progressing up to an advanced understanding of four main finance-related instructional content strands: Personal Finance, Economics, Entrepreneurship, and Investing.
Each section begins with a detailed ready-to-use planning guide and is brimming with handouts and resources—including engaging exercises, fun projectiles, easy-to-understand worksheets, and much more. Each section is divided into five color-coded sections scaling in difficulty, so that teachers, educators, and families can use their knowledge of the strengths and challenges their learners may face to adapt and modify each section to meet their specific learning styles, readiness, and needs. The stand-alone nature of each topic makes it easy to weave these important skills into any ongoing curriculum.
Personal Finance
Personal Finance is just that, it’s personal—and as a result, it’s valuable for everyone—kids, teachers, leaders, and families alike. With the help of the FUTURES™ program, kids can begin to more clearly define and understand a budget, the various categories within a budget, learn to create a budget, make budget adjustments, and apply this knowledge in memorable real-world settings. As kids create their own budgets after tracking expenses over time, learning the differences between a job and a career, a need and a want, and many other financial literacy nuances, budgeting becomes familiar and more infused into their learning strategies.
Like all four strands of FUTURES™, the Personal Finance strand is designed to help you “meet your kids where they are.” Each of the program’s 29 sections is organized around a Focus Question. For example, the Budget and Goal Setting section asks kids to consider the following: “When, how, and why is it beneficial to manage your money?” It's this kind of personalization that makes the learning process more relevant. It engages and involves the kids, inspiring them to really think about what they might do in a range of financial situations. These are just some of the strategies that help to makes FUTURES such a successful Financial Literacy program.
Economics
In the Economics strand of FUTURES™, a variety of section resources introduce kids to Economics concepts by incorporating fun activities and familiar real-world scenarios. Through leveled resources, kids learn the roles of consumers and producers, look at how money is used as a medium of exchange, and examine the trading process from various angles as well as gain an understanding of how goods and services are produced, consumed and exchanged. Kids even examine a city council budget, consider the fairness of a trade, and look at how advancements in musical technology, a highly popular topic, have impacted consumers.
It's through this guided, easy-to-access lesson plan approach that you can begin to coach your kids to expand their ideas about Personal Finance. This program helps to explain the larger role of Economics to everyone. They’ll build upon the base understanding from the Personal Finance strand, enlarging the scope of their financial literacy world by carefully explaining how businesses work within their own world and in the greater world view. Clarity about concepts like the flow of money and target markets are vital. These are defined in easy-to-understand language and through engaging worksheets, helping kids can begin to formulate a better understanding of just how much the economy impacts both their own lives and the world around them.
Entrepreneurship
The program’s detailed Entrepreneurship strand covers more than just Entrepreneurship; it covers a wealth of powerful future-focused leadership concepts for kids. From business startup and financing, flow of money, public and private corporations, target markets and the always important social responsibility, kids are able to experience and visualize themselves as entrepreneurial leaders. After all, tomorrow isn’t that far away!
With the help of FUTURES helpful worksheets and games, kids can unlock a richer grasp of what it takes to start and run a business—and many kids discover their own entrepreneurial passions, able to shape these glimmers of passions into future ideas. Just checkout the FUTURES success stories in the Program Overview!
Kids will also explore the various parts of building and running a successful business, learn how a franchise works, discover the difference between investing in a startup business versus a franchise, and investing in a business and running that same business every single day (and night!). They will also learn how to make financing decisions and become worthy candidates for credit.
In this strand, kids consider various factors for starting a business and the importance of goal setting at the beginning stages of the business—and every single day thereafter.
The Entrepreneurship strand helps kids explore how they might want to run their own businesses one day—soon. The foundation from the previous two strands allows them to start to brainstorm how their own personal finances impact the bigger economy around them.
Many of these kids just might start their very own businesses—with this strong jumpstart from FUTURES—and you!
Investing—in Everyone’s Bigger Future
From stocks and bonds to low- and high-risk investments to mutual funds, the nuances of investing can be intricate; this is why the Investment strand is so important. In these stand-alone sections and lessons, kids define investing and learn why investing is a beneficial practice. Beginning to understand the process of choosing a stock includes reading financial information, researching simple information, and comparing the stock to its peers. With the help of FUTURES easy-to-do worksheets and hands-on learning strategies, kids and adults can wrap their heads around even complicated investing details.
Investing in one's future is a key part of life and starts long before adulthood and entering the workforce. This is why it's so important to help kids understand that Financial Literacy is a powerful tool, designed to help them begin to plan and invest in the bigger future they want for themselves.
Adaptable, Versatile, and FREE
FUTURES: Financially Literate Kids for a Financially Literate Society™ is a highly adaptable and agile financial literacy program that works well in schools, classrooms, clubs, community centers and even around the dinner table. Want your kids to know more and become well-versed on economic topics in fun and easy-to-infuse ways? Just download any/all sections that appeal and pick and choose activities that connect to everyday topics in your class, group, or household. You don’t need to be a seasoned teacher to effectively incorporate these ideas in conversations, fun family exchanges, and to generally raise awareness about the power of economics. Teaching your kids how to be financially literate is what FUTURES is all about.
It’s Never a Wrap
Thanks for checking out all 30 Financial Literacy posts in honor of Financial Literacy Month! For more information about FUTURES: Financially Literate Kids for a Financially Literate Society™, this amazing (and FREE!) financial literacy program for students in kindergarten through eighth grade, or to download sections from the program, please click below.
Stay tuned for regular updates and Quick Refresher blog posts several times over the summer. While we won’t be posting every day, we’ll stay connected. The need for Financial Literacy never stops.
These 30 evergreen blog posts will remain up—and will remain relevant long after this Financial Literacy Month of April is over. Should you find yourself looking to connect financial literacy concepts to everything from curriculum themes to family life lessons, you’ll continue to be able to download and use this program with our compliments—any time, any place—to help your kids grow and flourish into Financially Literate Kids who become part of a Financially Literate Society.