Early College, elementary students talk money and how to use it during Jump$tart Teen Teach-In
Is now the time for that designer bag or could you do with something more basic? Is your money better off in the bank or in your pocket? Is buy now, pay later a good idea?
Students at Southwood Elementary School don’t have to grapple with tough financial questions yet, but on Wednesday third, fourth and fifth graders got a chance to consider them – to think about money and how best to use it – when the Jump$tart Teen Teach-In came to school.
“I think they’re going to get a life lesson today,” Richard Rouse said as his fifth-grade math students rotated around the Southwood gym, stopping at seven different instructional stations staffed by sophomores from the Economics and Personal Finance class at Lenoir County Early College High School.
“I still go through this same stuff right now with finances,” Rouse said. “I’ve been talking to them in class about how hard these (decisions) can be, especially with inflation.”
In the gym, where stickers were the coin of the realm, the Early College students worked to break theories of good money management down into practical terms. Southwood students heard about budgeting, the difference between needs and wants, money as a tool, opportunity costs, the value of saving, banking transactions and credit buying.
“Opportunity cost is the thing we miss out on when we choose another thing, so weighing your opportunity cost will help you decide which one do I want now and which one do I want later,” Kaylee Stallings explained to the elementary students.
“You make choices every day and you can’t have everything,” added Asher Eubanks, Kaylee’s colleague at the Opportunity Cost station. “Making smart decisions with money is something you have to do when you get older.”
This is the third time Dr. Travis Towne has moved his Early College students into instructor mode for the Jump$tart Teen Teach-In, a national program designed to acquaint elementary students with financial concepts, cement high school students’ knowledge of personal finance and point up the need for financial education in the classroom.
To maximize instructional time and reach more students this year, Towne adjusted the format to bring the elementary students to their “instructors” at a central location rather than have the Early College students go into the classrooms of an elementary school.
“We’ve gotten good feedback overall,” Towne said. “This is the first time we’ve done it this way, so hopefully we get good feedback today.”
Southwood students collected stickers as they stopped at each station, went to the bank to cash their stickers in for a debit card and moved on to the store, where they had their choice of pencils, 3D printed yellow jackets (Southwood’s mascot) that glow in the dark and other items made by Early College students. The price schedule: small, medium and large.
Fifth-grader Raegan Whitford shopped small, two stickers and three small things. “It’s better to have small things instead of large things because small things take up less space and they can cost less so you save up more money,” she said. “You should save money because if you save money you get more money for the fun things in life that you can do later on.”
Lenoir County Early College High School students, from left, Siddhi Sinhal, Kaylee Stallings and Asher Eubanks explain the concept of opportunity cost to a group of fifth graders on Wednesday when the Economics and Personal Finance class brought the Jump$tart Teen Teach-In to Southwood Elementary School.
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