First off — it’s Jessica, not Tim. While Tim taught the month of February at Eastside College Prep (in East Palo Alto, CA), I’m doing March, when we’ll cover budgeting and credit. So, I’m going to write the post-course updates, but I’m MUCH less prolific a blogger than Tim, so expect less.

My budgeting unit is two instructional days plus the case study, so today we did the big picture, semester-level budget. So, not so much, “How much are you spending on toothpaste?” but “You’re gonna need some money for miscellaneous expenses…”

Here’s the lesson plan I put together, with all the links to resources. I will say that resource 6, “Unanticipated Budget Changes” relies on a correctly completed spreadsheet from resource 5, “Three Students Budget for the Semester.” And not all of my students were able to finish resource 5 in the allotted time, so I skipped resource 6 altogether. In retrospect, I should have let the few students who did move quickly self-pace onto resource 6 themselves for an extra challenge. That said, I think resource 5 is EXTREMELY valuable as some students were confused by even categorizing items as “income” or “expenses,” and, at a higher level, the activity generated great questions such as:

• “Wait, in college, do you buy books once a year? Or do you buy new books every semester?”
• “If she’s using things like graduation gift money to meet her expenses, she won’t have any of that left for second semester. What’s she supposed to do now?”
• “OK, why would she upgrade to a nicer dorm room? A dorm room is a dorm room. She should save that!”

And, it got them practicing using a spreadsheet, which we always love to see!

I want to highlight the PRACTICE SAYING NO TO REQUESTS FOR CASH activity, which I designed just for this course (it’s not in our full curriculum yet…

About the Author

Jessica Endlich

When I started working at Next Gen Personal Finance, it's as though my undergraduate degree in finance, followed by ten years as an educator in an NYC public high school, suddenly all made sense.