Planning how to spend money

This lesson contains content from a lesson that was previously titled Banking and budgeting basics.

The suite of LifeSkills Money Skills content has recently been updated. Responding to insights from teaching professionals and the benefits of building key topics over time we’ve made changes enabling clearer sequencing through the content. This will support your pupils to deepen their knowledge as they progress through education and beyond.

To see an overview of the updates and where key topics can be found please visit Money Skills resource updates. The wider suite of Money Skills content has been developed to engage your pupils with a mix of resource types including interactive tools and films, aligns to the Young Money Financial Education Planning Framework and has been awarded the Young Money Quality Mark.

This lesson is part of our financial literacy content for ages 7-11 designed to teach children about money, whilst developing core transferable skills such as problem solving, aiming high (proactivity) and listening and speaking (communication). We recommend that you start with Samir’s birthday budget challenge and then use the remaining lessons in the order of your preference or as standalone resources.

The Planning how to spend money lesson focuses on introducing pupils to a range of topics linked to spending money including understanding the value of money, identifying the difference between needs and wants, using a budget and making purchases. Pupils will be asked to take income and expenditure into account to create a budget and plan purchases.

Resources

• Planning how to spend money: Lesson plan - for use with a group of pupils in the classroom.
• Planning how to spend money: Presentation slides - to display to pupils and use alongside the lesson plan, with interactive fields to complete as a class.
• Planning how to spend money: Interactive worksheet - to be provided to pupils so they can complete the activity (the worksheet can be printed or completed digitally).

Lesson learning outcomes

By the end of this lesson pupils will be able to:

• Practise being responsible for managing their own money.
• Know how to keep track of their money and set and stick to a budget.

Continue to support your pupils in developing maths skills within a money context with BBC Teach’s ‘Shop till you drop!’ quiz.

If you want to increase your own confidence to teach young people about money, Young Money provide free e-learning training to teachers across Primary and Secondary education. In addition, National Numeracy has a free website which helps you practise and refresh your everyday maths skills.