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Curriculum & Workshops 
The Financial Fitness for Life (FFFL) – Personal Finance Curriculum Series (an NCEE publication) In this, the third year of a three year grant from the Bank of America Foundation, NCEE is once again offering teacher training opportunities through ICEE Centers using the Financial Fitness for Life Curriculum during this 2005 calendar year. Teacher Training workshops featuring the Financial Fitness for Life Curriculum Series target teachers of K-12 children. Teacher participants receive a set of the Financial Fitness for Life Teacher’s Package containing a grade-appropriate Teacher’s Guide, Student Activity Workbook, Parent Guide, an accompanying CD-ROM, and a letter of permission to reprint materials for classroom use. Parent Workshops: Targeting parents of K-12 children, each participant receives a copy of a grade-appropriate Parent Guide and companion CD-ROM. The Parent Guide is designed to complement the lessons contained within the Financial Fitness for Life teacher and student guides and are divided into grades K-5 and grades 6-12. This is an excellent opportunity for teachers to have their lessons on personal finance and economics reinforced at home by parents. The Financial Fitness for Life curriculum is offered for four convenient grade bands: ¨ lower elementary (Grades K-2) ¨ upper elementary (3-5) ¨ middle school (6-8) ¨ high school (9-12) http://econed-il.org/workshops.html ICEE and its Centers/Offices offer more than one workshop at different grade levels. For more information on upcoming workshops for teachers and parents please contact the Centers/Offices in your region: http://econed-il.org/centers.html Learning, Earning, and Investing (LEI), sponsored by The Moody’s Foundation, includes 16 middle school and 7 high school lessons that cover all aspects of saving, investing, and money management; all can be used in conjunction with The Stock Market Game™ Program. The Center at UIUC has secured funding for workshops to be completed by fall 2005.
From the Coal Mines to the Power Lines is a K-12 Coal Curriculum series orchestrated and created by ICEE under contract with the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO). The 9 Lessons, 18 Topic Tie-Ins, and 3 Interactive Video Vocabulary Presentations, strive to teach economics while educating students about the natural resource of coal. Teachers interested in learning more about this curriculum are encouraged to contact: Linda
Dunbar, Education Program Coordinator Fall 2004 Making a Job Workshop Series a Huge Success! The Fall 2004 Making a Job (MAJ) workshop series sponsored by the Illinois Council through a grant from the Kauffman Foundation was a great success! The training, hosted by Homewood School District 153, was open to Illinois teachers of grades 5-12. Teacher participants evaluated the workshop as excellent in terms of workshop content, delivery, materials, facility and relevance. Curriculum series like MAJ are designed to equip teachers and prepare students for a career as an entrepreneur. MAJ is an experience-based awareness and readiness curriculum designed to take students through the initial stages of recognizing an opportunity in their own world (school, home, community) to developing a business plan for a viable entrepreneurial business venture. According to the Fall 2004 issue of The Inside Vault, an economic education newsletter from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, more than seventy percent of American adults would prefer being an entrepreneur than working for someone else. The Making a Job curriculum integrates language arts, social studies, math, critical thinking, problem solving and includes concepts/skills in the new state learning standards for social studies/economics. For more information on the Making a Job curriculum, please go to http://info.makingajob.com An Additional Resource The Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education, an organization recognized as the national leader in advocating entrepreneurship education hosts a web page that is designed for teachers, instructors, program developers and others who help students of all ages find their own entrepreneurial opportunities. The site offers what the creators refer to as a “Toolkit” for the National Content Standards for Entrepreneurship Education, and is designed to give readers the Standards and Performance Indicators framework necessary for developing curriculum for entrepreneurship programs as a lifelong learning process. Along with the Standards, the Toolkit contains background information on Entrepreneurship Education and the Lifelong Learning Model for Entrepreneurship Education, sample applications of the Standards, and information about the research used to develop the Standards. According to the site, the standards committee asked entrepreneurs throughout the United States to tell “what they do as an entrepreneur and what they needed to know to do it." The result was three interlocking curriculum areas that are the gears that will keep our entrepreneurial culture strong and our economy moving forward into the future. More information about the Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education and National Content Standards for Entrepreneurship Education can be located at: |
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