Smarter shopping skills

This lesson contains content from a lesson that was previously titled Making the most of money.

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 Smarter shopping skills lesson focuses on helping pupils to become savvy consumers and recognise value for money. Sales tactics that are used in advertising and to promote products are explored, supporting pupils to become critical consumers making value-based purchase decisions.

Resources

• Making the most of money: Lesson plan – for use with a group of pupils in the classroom.
• Making the most of money: Presentation slides – to display to pupils and use alongside the lesson plan, with interactive fields to complete activities as a class.

Lesson learning outcomes

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

• Feel confident and in control of their financial situation.
• Understand why we should all be critical consumers and think carefully about how we use our money.
• Understand why making informed decisions will help make the most of the money they have.

Continue to support your pupils in developing maths skills within a money context with BBC Teach's 'All the fun of the fair' 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.