Our warm up today was on making change:

This one was an easy Monday morning warm up. We had a discussion on getting change back and rounding to the nearest nickel since we eliminated pennies.

I then presented this picture and asked “Tell me something you notice”

Students noticed:

• parts are blacked out.
• the date and time
• the location
• it was a withdrawal of $200.

We guessed at the bank balance and then revealed….

Whoa!! We talked about what we could buy with that much money!

We did this all over again with this image:

They noticed the same things as before but with the addition of the $3 charge. Most knew that this was possibly a charge for withdrawing money from an ATM that is not from your bank. I say most, because I have one 17 year old that does not have or ever had a bank account. Everyday is in complete amazement….and frustration.

We looked at the balance:

We talked about negative balance and overdraft. We came to the conclusion that we don’t want this to happen to us….which led us into today’s goal: Keeping track of transactions and updating our balance.

I borrowed elements of this activity from an iTunes U course called Consumer Mathematics. The course has lots of activities that overlap with our MEL3E course! If you have an iOS device you can subscribe to get the resources.

I modified the activity slightly.

I handed out a copy of the transaction recording sheet.

I placed 18 numbered scenarios around the room (I hid one in a hard to find place!). We completed scenario 1 and 2 together as a class as examples. Next, each student rolled 3 dice. The total sum on the dice told them what transaction to go to next.

Individually they visited the transactions and updated their balance. I voiced “Who will be the first to run out of money?” while they moved around. If they rolled the same number as one they visited already they HAD to do that one again. It added some riskiness to the activity…..You would be wiped out if you had station 13 come up more than once. But if you had station 6 come up more than once you were jumping for joy! Everyone had to do 12 transactions and then fill out the bottom part of the sheet.

As a group they wouldn’t say out loud that they were excited to get up….but I think they appreciated moving around the room instead of just sitting at a desk.

The original task from the iTunes U course had them scan a QR code that would send them to Google’s Dice Roller to “roll the dice”. I opted out of that today since our internet hasn’t been reliable at all this semester…..We had enough dice to share around.

Tomorrow we’ll practice some more transactions!

More on Compound Interest, Financial Literacy and More

If you are interested in finding more ways to bring out financial literacy concepts in your classroom, consider subscribing to my podcast called Invested Teacher on Apple, Spotify, YouTube and other platforms. While we focus on how we as educators can better manage and invest our money, we also have episodes where we chat about how we can share that financial learning with our students, too.