How to Teach Financial Literacy with Recaps in LiveSchool

But do your students realize they are learning real-world skills at the same time? It’s called Financial Literacy.

What is Financial Literacy?

Financial Literacy is the understanding and ability to use financial skills like saving, investing, and managing debt to make informed and effective decisions.

Currently, the requirements around how much schools should teach financial literacy vary across state lines. But if the requirement is to get students to be real-world ready, then most people would argue that includes teaching basic financial concepts.

How Do You Teach Financial Literacy?

There’s a difference between explaining the concepts of Financial Literacy and providing students with experiences to actually put those skills to use. As Jason Haniger, former Principal at Barry School, recently shared on our webinar, “Kids have to have the opportunity to use currency, make decisions, make mistakes, and that’s how they’re going to learn.”

He’s right. Research is showing that theory does not impact change - students have to practice it over and over and over again. So how do you provide that practice time?

Financial Literacy & LiveSchool Recaps

In February 2022, LiveSchool launched Recaps, a weekly email for students and parents to stay up-to-date on their LiveSchool points. Think of it as an online banking tool for your students (there’s a reason we put a debit card at the top of the page 😏).

Students and parents can pull up their Recaps and see their current bank account in LiveSchool, the points they have received from their teachers that week (as well as past weeks in the school year), and view the reasons for earning (or losing) those points.

Now that LiveSchool is providing this tool for students and parents, we have an even better opportunity to give our students practice time with their financial literacy skills. Let’s talk about how this works.

Points = Payment

In LiveSchool, students are able to receive points for positive behavior just like how we get paid for doing our jobs. These points are deposited into the student’s LiveSchool bank account and they can save up to purchase items from the school store.

The weekly Recap allows students to view their bank accounts and make decisions about whether they want to spend or save their points.

This reflection time/decision-making is crucial in teaching financial literacy. You can connect the information on their Recaps to earning, spending, and saving concepts.

Looking at Recaps

We have two ways of providing the Recap data:

1. Digitally - students can pull up their Recap on any device to see their information
2. On a printable report - staff members can download a Student Dashboard report in LiveSchool to share the week’s data with the student

It’s important that we also provide time for students to look over their LiveSchool data. Here are some ways you can do that:

1. Reflection Sheet for Homework
2. Partner Class Activity
3. 1:1 Meeting With a Teacher and Student
4. House Activity

Financial Literacy Reflections

Based on the age of the students, we may need to scaffold the learning to help make  connections between their behavior and the points they are earning, spending, and saving. Here are some questions to ask your students:

1. How many points did you earn last week?
2. How many points did you earn this week?
3. Did you go up or down from last week?
4. What is your goal for next week?
5. Did you purchase an item this week?
6. If so, how much was it?
7. What items are you saving for?
8. How much more do you have to save for the items you want?
9. What can you do to help save for that?

Download these questions as a worksheet →

Next Steps for You

It’s a win-win to use LiveSchool for meaningful practice with Financial Literacy especially to make real-world connections for students.

If you’re interested in learning more about how LiveSchool can practically support financial literacy, check out our webinar with Jason Haniger, to hear specifics on how his school was able to accomplish it!