Learning the 1-2-3s of Money Management While Having Fun
CASE Credit Union provides financial literacy lessons to a young audience
We all want our children to be successful. That’s why we teach them the skill sets they will need when they become adults and set out on their own.
While some life lessons can be learned with relative ease – things such as doing laundry or housekeeping – others are more difficult to grasp, especially if the adults in their lives are not familiar with those topics.
Unfortunately, that means many of our children are not learning the vital skill of money management. They are not being taught to recognize the difference between wants and needs, such as not to give-in to instant gratification by spending money on a video game console while letting their rent or car payments lapse.
That’s why CASE Credit Union formed the Training Team with employees from across the credit union. The Training Team began working with children in Lansing, Michigan, at the city-sponsored summer day camp. CASE Credit Union also teams up year-round with the Boys and Girls Club of Lansing to help children understand the importance of money management.
“We know that some children just never have the opportunity to learn how important it is to save money to build their future,” said Molly Summerfield, assistant vice president of marketing, CASE Credit Union. “But we didn’t just want to sit them in a room and lecture them about money management – that would feel too much like school and wouldn’t necessarily have an impact. We wanted to make money management fun.”
To that end, the CASE Credit Union Training Team began developing original games that would put children’s imaginations into overdrive.
“We wanted to come up with games that were familiar enough that the kids would not be intimidated by the subject of handling their finances,” explained Olivia McCormick, CASE Credit Union’s Training program coordinator. “We found that our campers and the kids at the Boys and Girls Club learned best when they didn’t realize the fun they were having was actually teaching them an important lesson. I think we have been very successful to that end.”
Among the games the CASE Training Team devised are:
- Octopus ring toss: This game involves placing an octopus with different values on its tentacles on one side of a long table and placing the tossing rings on the other end and establishing teams. If a student’s ring lands on a tentacle, the player will be asked a question from that value. Categories include true or false; understanding finances; spending plans and goals; needs or wants (two tentacles); goals; decision-making skills; and coin and bill values. A correct answer adds the designated value to a student’s sheet. When time is up, they add up their team’s sheet and the team with the most monetary value wins.
- Needs vs. wants balloon hunt: You’ll need as many fly swatters as teams you plan to have, two bins or laundry baskets and balloons with various wants and needs written on them. Designate which team will be wants and which will be needs. One member of each team takes a fly swatter and uses it to move their chosen balloon into the bin, without using their hands. Then the player passes their swatter off to a teammate who takes his or her turn. The game ends when all balloons have been collected. Each team will designate a player to show the balloons one at a time and explain why it is in his or her bin.
- Ice-cream cone game: Cut ice-cream cones and ice-cream scoop shapes out of construction paper. Give each student one cone shape and a minimum of three scoop shapes. Write money values on each scoop. Instruct the kids to glue the scoops on top of the cone, adding the values of their scoops and writing the total amount of their scoops on the cone.
- Lego
competition: Sort Lego bricks by color and put several of one color in one
sandwich bag, several of another color in a second bag, and so forth. Label
each bag with how much each block would be worth if used. Vary the number of
Legos in each bag. Hide all the bags and instruct the teams of two to four
players to brainstorm a design, and then give them two to three minutes to create
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CASE Credit Union provides financial literacy lessons to a young audience
We all want our children to be successful. That’s why we teach them the skill sets they will need when they become adults and set out on their own.
While some life lessons can be learned with relative ease – things such as doing laundry or housekeeping – others are more difficult to grasp, especially if the adults in their lives are not familiar with those topics.