Samir's birthday budget challenge

The suite of LifeSkills Money Skills content has recently been updated. Responding to insights from teaching professionals and the benefits of building key topics over time we’ve made changes enabling clearer sequencing through the content. This will support your pupils to deepen their knowledge as they progress through education and beyond.

To see an overview of the updates and where key topics can be found please visit Money Skills resource updates. The wider suite of Money Skills content has been developed to engage your pupils with a mix of resource types including interactive tools and films, aligns to the Young Money Financial Education Planning Framework and has been awarded the Young Money Quality Mark.

Samir’s birthday budget challenge is a fun story-based interactive activity inviting pupils to follow Samir as he spends his birthday budget, keeping an eye out for clues along the way to solve the mystery of the missing money. The activity encourages pupils to explore key financial skills like budgeting and teaches them about digital and cashless transactions.

This lesson is part of our financial literacy content for ages 7-11 designed to teach children about money, whilst developing core transferable skills such as problem solving, aiming high (proactivity) and listening and speaking (communication).

Resources

• Samir’s birthday budget challenge: Lesson plan – for use with a group of pupils in the classroom.
• Samir’s birthday budget challenge: Presentation slides – to display to pupils and use alongside a lesson plan.

Lesson learning outcomes

By the end of the lesson pupils will be able to:

• Understand key financial terminology.
• Understand the value of money.
• Understand how to manage and use money in an increasingly digital or cashless society and how to keep money safe.
• Use the core transferable skill of problem solving to work out where the missing money may have gone.

Help your pupils put their budgeting skills into practice with this BBC Teach Super Movers video, which helps young people understand the arithmetic needed to calculate change with a catchy song.

If you want to increase your own confidence to teach young people about money, Young Money provide free e-learning training to teachers across Primary and Secondary education. In addition, National Numeracy has a free website which helps you practise and refresh your everyday maths skills.