Help me give my students a unique currency system on campus to simulate earning, saving, investing, and spending money strategically and collectively.
FULLY FUNDED! Mx. B's classroom raised $367
This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
My Project
Students love the feeling of holding and folding money in their hands. This project leverages the beneficial brain chemicals associated with that symbolic and tactile experience by putting real bills into student hands to teach financial literacy.
With this project, we will produce 1,500 long-lasting folding bills on durable Tyvek paper – and this currency is the cornerstone for operating an economic simulation for the students at our school.
This custom paper currency will be the primary instrument for teaching students to earn, save and invest, protect, spend, and borrow funds responsibly.
In a term-limited context (because adolescents are developing the capacity for long-term thinking), this economic simulation primarily reinforces earning and saving/investment skills by implementing a concrete, finite currency system for teachers and students to interact with. We have 4 terms per school year.
Physical manipulatives (like paper money) are vital for teaching financial literacy concepts because real paper bills provide a memorable and multi-sensory experience that students can connect to abstract concepts like time and accrued interest. Students' positive cultural associations with physical money can also increase student self-confidence, which can reduce emotional stress and enable cognitive access to deeper understanding.
We aim to responsibly steward students' learning by cultivating strategic dopamine production and release because this neuromodulator (brain chemical messenger) is linked reward, learning, memory, and addiction, and is associated with feelings of pleasure, satisfaction, and motivation.
We want students to have deep, positive emotional experiences linked to long-term thinking and habits for investing, collective fundraising, and other complex or abstract financial behaviors that can reinforce the benefits of strategic spending or delayed gratification.
Students in a Digital Art class will design the front and back of the bills.
Nearly all students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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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 Mx. B and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
