"Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve." - Roger Lewin. I teach first to eighth grades, gifted students in Southwest Missouri. These vibrant, eager students need opportunities to stretch and grow their minds in ways they can't always do in a regular classroom. Robert Maynard Hutchins has said, "The objective of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives."
"Financial education needs to become a part of our national curriculum and scoring systems so that it's not just the rich kids that learn about money...it's all of us." -David Bach.
My active students respond best to hands-on activities that allow them to think, move and create. In our school, more than sixty-five percent of our students receive free or reduced price lunch due to their economic status. They live in families whose incomes are at or below poverty level. Ruby K. Payne has said that "The two things that move a person out of poverty are education and relationships." This project's goal is to help me provide this education as they build strong relationships with their fellow students.
My Project
As educators, we all believe that personal finance education is vital for the next generation. But when and where do we find the time and resources for financial literacy classes? We need to add a financial literacy component into every subject that we teach. I would like to add a financial literacy component into my STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) lab.
I plan to teach my students about financial literacy by providing them with real life scenarios that incorporate learning about credit, debt, budgeting, investments, investors, producers and profit as they participate in STEM challenges.
As my students participate in STEM activities by engineering LEGO cars and other robotic devices, they will learn about these concepts of financial literacy. They will need to discuss finding investors for their projects and make a proposal to a committee of investors (fellow students). Then we will budget finances to pay for materials from the classroom STEM cart and LEGO collection. They will need to decide who their target market will be and develop advertising campaigns. They will need to learn how to calculate profits for their final product.
These LEGO kits will add the "raw materials" to our STEM cart so that my students can design, create and produce products as they solve problems while engineering with these LEGOs.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mrs. Hansen and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
