In Texas, the teaching standards for 4th grade a mostly similar to Common Core for math, but they veer in a completely different direction with the unit on Personal Financial Literacy.  I wish I had learned these skills when I was coming up, so I LOVE teaching them to my students.  Well, we spent a few weeks talking about budgets, fixed expenses vs. variable expenses, income, and savings… And then I wanted the students to put these skills into action!

In this research project, students had to choose a career, find the median salary for this career, create a budget based on the median salary, find a car to purchase online, find a place to live online, and then put whatever leftover money they had towards savings.  The budget was created in Excel, and there were formulas for students.

After their budget was completed, the students were ready for the real work of researching their job.  Their final product was going to be made into a book, typed from Microsoft Word.  To prepare for this, I created a graphic organizer (packet) that helped them find and source the information and then led them to writing each paragraph.  There were sentence starters in 3 of the 6 chapters, as well as a bonus chapter for extra credit.  Students were  given the choice of their book design, and once they selected their design, their Word document would open, which was a book template that they were able to customize.  This book has a plethora of text features, like a graph, a glossary, citations page, table of contents, section headings, italics, bold print, photographs, and captions, etc.  I am excited about seeing my students’ final products!

In the meantime, here are images from my sample/example book that I shared with my students.

Also, here is a link to our project website, which has most of the resources that my students used.  The graphic organizer or project summary page are not posted here.

http://monthlybudget.edublogs.org/