Teach Your Students All About Making Money with This Free Lesson and Worksheet

Including tons of essential vocabulary!

Sponsored By Regions Next Step
Flat lay of Money Matters lesson

If there’s a financial topic that inherently interests kids in grades 3-5, it’s definitely making money. Grab this “Money Matters” lesson and worksheet and dive into topics like allowances, jobs for kids, and wages vs. salary. It’s all part of our Adventures in Math resource center!

What’s in the “Money Matters” lesson?

This lesson is divided into five parts:

Part 1—Vocabulary/Concept Development: Kick things off with a fun “snowball” activity. This section is a great ELA connection because it’s chock-full of vocabulary such as allowance, paycheck, and more.

Part 2—Exploring Allowances: Take a class survey on allowances, discuss the results, and compare them to a national poll.

Part 3—Earning Money Now: Brainstorm creative ways for kids to make some cash.

Part 4—Hands-On Activity: Start thinking about future careers and make a list.

Part 5—Making Money Student Worksheet: Try these fun, money-based word problems! Bonus: It’s available in Spanish.

Standards

  • Develop an understanding of personal financial literacy, including income and wages, savings options, spending, and charitable giving.
  • Participate in group discussions.
  • Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
  • Communicate mathematical ideas, reasoning, and relationships.
  • Apply mathematics to solve problems arising in everyday life.
  • Solve problems using the four operations with whole numbers and fractions.
  • Use place value understanding and properties of operations to perform multi-digit arithmetic.
  • Solve multi-step word problems.
  • Analyze information, formulate a plan or strategy, determine a solution, justify the solution, and evaluate the problem-solving process and the solution.
  • Represent and interpret data.

Get the Lesson