Research shows that a high-quality financial literacy education positively impacts students’ future financial habits, making them more likely to budget and avoid predatory loans as adults. These findings are intuitive: financial literacy gives young people the tools to manage money effectively, paving the way for brighter futures.
To support educational programs that provide students with equitable access to the life skills needed to achieve financial security, the National Endowment for Financial Education designated April as Financial Literacy Month.
Because a learner’s level of financial literacy correlates with many factors, including socioeconomic status, teaching the topic often means addressing a broad spectrum of student experiences in a single classroom. To address these diverse needs, turn to Gale for engaging content and activities that support differentiated instruction.
Gale In Context platforms offer ready-made, standards-aligned tools for teaching financial literacy at every grade level. Whether introducing foundational skills or tackling complex topics like credit and investing, Gale’s curated Financial Literacy Month resources make lesson planning and execution more manageable. With Gale In Context: Educators, teachers can further simplify lesson planning by accessing and organizing materials from multiple grade-specific platforms, making it easier to tailor activities to learners’ needs.
Teach the Fundamentals of Earning, Spending, and Saving with Gale In Context: Elementary
Elementary students are at the perfect age for early lessons on the fundamentals behind all financial decisions: earning, saving, and spending.
At this stage of development, financial literacy education should focus on the most tangible and relatable concepts. Creating a classroom economy, where students earn “currency” for completing tasks, helps them understand that their time and efforts have value—just as they will in the workplace. Then, when it’s time to decide whether to spend or save, you can have an organic dialogue about the rewards of delayed gratification and prioritize long-term goals over impulse buys.
Keeping these lessons grounded in everyday experiences and promoting the positive outcomes of financial know-how prepares young learners for an optimistic outlook on their future money management.
Activity: 15 Minutes to Mastery: Support Financial Literacy Lessons
To get situated with the financial literacy content available through Gale In Context: Elementary, begin with our webinar, 15 Minutes to Mastery: Support Financial Literacy Lessons.
This quick session demonstrates how teachers can use the Social Studies topic page to explore areas like money and economics. Students can discover curated collections of leveled texts and multimedia content related to banking, supply and demand, saving money, and more.
Each topic page also presents questions like, why do people save money? Or, what services do banks provide? These questions can spark student discussions about real-world financial concepts.
Prepare Students for Real-World Financial Responsibilities with Gale In Context: Middle School
By middle school, students are beginning to understand the value of money in more personal ways—managing allowances and earnings from small jobs, making independent purchase decisions, and saving up for things they want to buy.
However, their understanding of financial systems is limited to their immediate experiences. Financial literacy education can bridge the gap so students can connect their personal money management to broader ideas like banking and household budgeting.
This is also a time when their critical thinking skills are rapidly developing. Middle schoolers are ready to ask more profound, abstract questions about why some financial decisions lead to success and others to setbacks.
Educators can guide students beyond the “what” of financial literacy—What is a budget? What is a savings account?—and into the why and how. Why does budgeting lead to better outcomes? How do banking systems impact finances?
Activity: Money and Banking Scavenger Hunt
The Money and Banking Scavenger Hunt, one of a suite of activities available from Gale In Context: Middle School, invites students to start their exploration with the Money and Banking topic page. From here, middle schoolers can access a topic overview before diving into the specific questions in the scavenger hunt, such as “What is the difference between a credit card and a debit card?” and “How does budgeting contribute to happiness?”
The topic page also encourages students to satisfy their curiosity with links to content that branch out into related resources. For example, exploring the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank may lead learners to investigate risk management or government banking regulations more deeply. These topics will serve them well as they consider making their own investments as they become adults.
While this setup gives students the freedom to pursue their interests, teachers can rest assured that all content on the platform is educational and developmentally appropriate for middle schoolers.
Build Financial Confidence with Gale In Context: High School
Many high schoolers are applying their knowledge and know-how while opening bank accounts and earning their first paychecks. They’re also facing big questions about their future: like whether their educational aspirations are compatible with the reality of a four-year college degree that costs more than $9,750 annually for in-state and $28,386 for out-of-state tuition. Some are even thinking further ahead, researching the long-term earning potential of their desired fields.
High school students would most benefit from financial literacy instruction that equips them to navigate these decisions, evaluate trade-offs, and build confidence in their ability to manage their finances.
It’s particularly helpful to cover the debt—not only because of student loans but because they will start receiving credit card offers once they turn 18. As anyone who has found themselves using their charge card more often than they would like can attest, it’s a challenging hole to get out of, and teaching students to avoid it altogether (or at least be smart about it) can save them a lot of stress later.
Activity: Personal Finance Scavenger Hunt
The Loans and Credit activity introduces students to key concepts like debt management, credit scores, and loan types. Starting with the Personal Finance topic page, students can research topics such as adjustable-rate mortgages and “buy now, pay later” plans. Using a collaborative jigsaw format, they can further analyze the trade-offs of different borrowing options, applying their findings to scenarios like financing education or purchasing a car.
Activity: Saving and Investing
Creating the conditions that lead to lifelong financial stability starts early. Even from their first paycheck, students can move money into high-interest savings accounts or open retirement plans that will continue to grow throughout their working years. The Saving and Investing activity highlights the importance of long-term planning, diversification, risk management, and more.
Activity: Inflation Scavenger Hunt
High schoolers about to participate in the democratic process must learn to analyze the larger societal and global systems that influence their personal finance decisions. The Inflation Scavenger Hunt available via Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints scaffolds this complex topic, beginning with definitions and causes and progressing to case studies illustrating global effects. Along the way, students engage with diverse viewpoints, prompting them to consider whether inflation represents growth or systemic failure.
Streamline Lesson Planning with Gale In Context: For Educators
Even when schools and districts have adopted technology to support digital learning, parsing through the sheer abundance of digital resources presents its own challenges.
To help ease that burden, we partnered with teachers to make lesson planning more intuitive by developing Gale In Context: For Educators. The centralized teaching platform unifies content across Elementary, Middle School, High School, and Opposing Viewpoints to make lesson planning more efficient. Coupled with the vast library of primary sources, periodicals, videos, audio content, and more, it is a full-stack solution for aligning lessons with curriculum standards, tailoring materials to varying learning levels, and delivering genuinely engaging instruction.
Gale In Context: For Educators also integrates with learning management systems like Google Classroom so teachers are only a click away from sharing resources and creating digital assignments. Furthermore, Gale offers data points to measure student progress with integrated assessments to check for understanding.
To learn more about how Gale In Context: For Educators can help guide your financial literacy lesson planning, check out the Discover Financial Literacy Content Within Gale In Context: For Educators tip sheet. We introduce how to use these instructional tools to collect, organize, customize, and share classroom instructional materials in preparation for Financial Literacy Month.
Want to see the Gale In Context databases in action? Connect with a Gale sales representative and request a free trial!