Elementary Financial Literacy: Christmas Holiday Budget Project

Help your elementary students practice budgeting and financial literacy skills as they plan for the winter holidays. An excellent thematic math lesson to use in the week or two before winter holidays when you need to capture your students' attention while still working on math curriculum!

In this Christmas Budget Math Project students will have to try the whole budgeting process: explain where they will get their shopping money for the holidays, plan who to shop for, look through fliers or online to find items to buy, and stick to their budgets!

This may require adding items up and realizing they have spent too much. There may be trade-offs made during the process, which is a great preview of real life! There is also room to write a reflection after the activity to help stimulate a class discussion about financial literacy and budgeting.

Grades to Use With:

This project is designed to be used in elementary classrooms including 3rd grade, 4th grade, 5th grade, and 6th grade.

Students will need to be able to add decimal numbers by hand or with a calculator.

It could also be used in special education classrooms in the middle years where appropriate.

Standards:

4th Grade Numbers in Base Ten: Add and subtract numbers using the standard algorithm.

5th Grade Numbers in Base Ten: Perform the four operations with decimals to the hundredths (money).

Mathematical Practice Standard 4: Model everyday situations with mathematics.

What's Included: 4 page PDF: Ready to Print and Use!

1. Title Page

2. Student Planning Page

3. Student Shopping List

4. Student Reflection

If you enjoy this financial literacy lesson, check out others in my store:

• Grocery Game: Estimating, Adding and Multiplying Decimals

• Create Your Dream Store: Math Project with Decimal Calculations and Budgeting

• Financial Literacy: My Budget Project for Elementary Students (Gr 3-6): Fun and Visual

• Financial Literacy: My Party Budget: Decimal and Percentages Application