January 2024 Content Update

lessons

Hey Teachers – we’ve got an exciting update for our learning library for January 2024!

New Video

First up, we have a new video about how to manage receipts!

This video is included in our lesson on “Managing Receipts” in our Personal Finance Learning Library for classes too.

This joins our other video lessons covering What is Money, Pay Yourself First, and Budgeting, with more coming soon!

New Personal Finance Lessons

For the start of the Spring semester, we have added three new financial literacy lessons to our library:

Note – you will need a PersonalFinanceLab admin account to view these lessons. If you don’t have one yet, sign up for our Teacher Test Drive!

New Budget Game Lessons

Our Budget Game also has mini-lessons sprinkled throughout each game checkpoint to hammer home important financial concepts for students. We have added shorter versions of our main lessons on Retirement Planning, Disability Insurance, Workplace Benefits, and Annuities to the budget game as well, plus a lesson on Term Life Insurance (based on our existing lesson on Life Insurance).

New Canadian Lessons

For Canadian schools using PersonalFinanceLab, we’ve also added Canadian versions of 7 of our most US-centric lessons. These new lessons include:

The Canadian lessons appear at the bottom of our Personal Finance task list.

If you accidentally require students to complete both the US and Canadian versions of any lessons, don’t worry – students completing either version will give credit for both.

New Activities

We also have two new interactive projects for students as well, which you can also include when creating an Assignment.

Filling Out The 1040

In this activity, students are provided with basic tax forms – a W-2, 1099, and information about their background.

They need to work through filling out a Form 1040 to file federal income taxes with the information provided. The activity gives them information on each form to guide them, and real-time feedback on each item they entered to find out if they still owe taxes or are getting a refund, and how much.

You can require this activity for your class by using Assignments, within the unit on taxes.

View This Activity (requires login)

How To Compare Stocks And Conduct Basic Research

This activity walks students through the action of researching and buying their first stock. We have them start with “buy what you know”, and use our Research Tool to find the ticker symbol of a company they are already familiar with.

Then we walk them through using the Research Tool to find basic fundamental information on this company, including:

  • Current Price, price last year, and its change over time
  • Earnings Per Share (EPS), Dividends, and what this means
  • Fundamental information from the company’s Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement
  • New stories mentioning this stock
  • A stock chart showing the stock price’s movement over time

This is a fundamental activity to help students get started in the Stock Game, introducing them to key data points (and how to find/use basic information on financial statements), find a comparable stock, and make an educated decision on their first purchases.

This activity is included in our “Intermediate Investing” unit. If you choose to include it in your Class Assignment, students can re-use this template for future stock comparisons too – not just their first purchase.

View This Activity (requires login)

Coming Soon

We have more updates to our lesson library coming this Spring! Watch out for more animated videos (“How to manage bills” coming up next), new Economics lesson plans, a slew of new pre-built PowerPoint templates for your classes, and more!

We hope you’re as excited as we are!

-The PFinLab Team