Last week, we announced the winners of our First Annual Financial Literacy Month Contest.  We received over forty entries, from high school and college personal finance educators throughout the United States, in two categories:  “Best Personal Finance Resource” and “Best Personal Finance Activity.”

Each of the five winners in the “Best Resource” category will be receiving $100 from NGPF and were featured in an NGPF blog post.  In this category, teachers were asked to describe their favorite personal finance resource and why their students loved it.  The winners are:

• Louise Biron, Director of Financial Aid at SUNY-Cobleskill, produced an original video to teach students how to manage their student debt successfully to avoid default.

• Barbara O’Neill, a Finance Professor at Rutgers University, has her students analyze a popular TV series, Shark Tank, as a tool to teach them about entrepreneurship.

• Kelly Boyer, a Special Education teacher at South Brunswick High School in Monmouth Junction New Jersey, recommended Money Instructor, which provides her students with the lessons, vocabulary and activities that are central to her course.

• Alex Lamon, an Economics and Business Teacher at Livingston High School in Livingston, New Jersey, uses Financial Football, which uses engaging game mechanics to provide his students with a comprehensive review of financial literacy topics.

• Tara Schoeny, an Economics/Personal Finance Teacher at Sycamore High School in Montgomery, Ohio, uses the FAFSA 4Caster tool to encourage the conversation between her students and their parents about how they are going to pay for college.

Each of the “Best Activity” award winners will be receiving $500 from Next Gen Personal Finance and were featured in an  NGPF blog post.  Their original activities are creative, teach key personal finance skills and provide supports that make them easy for other educators to implement in the classroom.

• Kate Ivers, a Business Education teacher at Rockford High School in Rockford, Minnesota, created a Housing Simulation in which students go through the rigors of the mortgage application process with a local banker and once approved get to build a model of their dream home  but only after creating a materials list.

• Barbara O’Neill, a Finance Professor at Rutgers University, has created real-life personal finance case studies that serve as a capstone project for her students.  As she described in her proposal, this teaching method develops critical thinking skills and helps her students see financial planning as a holistic process, in which personal finance topics are interconnected.

• Jonathan Toczynski and Danielle Sawyer, Financial and Business Literacy teachers at John F. Kennedy Memorial High School in Iselin, New Jersey, created a Cost of Living Project, in which students create a real-life budget impacted by decisions they make about where they live and the career they choose.  Students also conduct their own research to determine their cost of housing and transportation.

NGPF would like to thank all the educators who took the time to share their favorite resources and activities with us. We received a large number of excellent entries that demonstrate the commitment of personal finance educators to find and develop engaging curricula for their students.

About the Author

Andrew Furth

Andrew comes from a family of educators, and joined Teach for America after graduating from UCLA with a degree in English. During his three years teaching Social Studies, in both rural Arkansas and urban San Francisco, he realized the potential of online tools to amplify the reach and impact of learning for teachers and students. Andrew joined NGPF in 2014, bringing his educational expertise to designing lessons while learning on the job how to manage his own finances (which comes in handy in San Francisco, where the crazy rent means budgets are always tight).