Will you buy Mom a $20 gift or make a book of coupons that she can exchange for your household services?  Buy candy with money that you earn shoveling snow or put the money in your piggy bank?  Play basketball with friends or earn $10 raking leaves?  These are a few of the choices made by  students and their families as they played a board game called Race to Save at Family Math and Personal Finance Nights, held at Bancroft and Elbert Palmer schools in November. 

A total of 105 parents and their children participated in spending, saving, and budgeting games developed by the CEEE to teach and reinforce money management skills.  The evening programs encouraged parents to talk to their children about money decisions and also provided students with the opportunity to apply math skills learned in the classroom. Family nights are funded by the Delaware Council on Economic Education with support from JPMorgan Chase.

Teachers in Delaware are helping their students make sense of the economic world around them by implementing lessons from Virtual Economics (VE) in their K-12 classrooms. The interactive teaching tool contains a database of 79 publications and over 1,250 activity-based lessons in micro, macro and international economics and personal finance. Teachers can search the database by grade level, economic concept or state standards. They can also browse more than 50 economic concepts including brief explanations and glossaries, multimedia presentations, lessons, and online resources. In addition, the Virtual Economics CD ROM contains publications and lessons related to civics, geography, and U.S. and world history, making it a valuable teaching tool for all social studies teachers.  

The CEEE conducted six VE workshops this year, distributing materials to more than 70 additional Delaware teachers and providing them with instruction in classroom implementation.  To date, more than 420 teachers have been prepared to implement this curriculum statewide. This training was made possible with grants from the Council on Economic Education and State Farm Insurance. 

CEEE Provides Money Games at Bank of America's National Volunteer Day

Families participated in board games such as "Can You Buy It," which required students to use math skills learned in the classroom to decide if they had sufficient income or financial assets to purchase specific goods and services. Middle and high school students allocated limited "incomes" of M&Ms to a variety of fixed, regular and discretionary expenses. As an incentive to participate in the budgeting game, the students were encouraged to eat their "incomes" at the end of the activity.

Although personal finance games were one part of Bank of America's National Volunteer Day program, the greater theme of community service unified the event. Other activities included making simple articles of clothing and assembling household objects to be distributed to Wilmington residents in need. Providing such volunteer activities for families to participate in together underscored Bank of America's ongoing mission to become more engaged in and supportive of the surrounding community. (See more photos from the event..)