High School Financial Literacy: Stock Market Project- Investing

This engaging and useful stock market project can teach your high school students all about several financial literacy topics: investing their savings, buying shares (stocks) in a company, calculating their gains and losses, investment volatility, calculating the mean, length of investment (time horizon) and more!

How to Use:

1. On Day 1, have your students complete the first worksheet. They can use the included website to look at a variety of different stocks and their historical performances. They will divide up their thousand dollar investment between two different companies, and calculate how many shares the will be able to buy from each company they picked to invest in.

2. Then, schedule three separate classes over the next month or so to check on the stocks. Each time, your students will record that day's current share price and calculate their shares' current investment value.

3. On the final day, your students will calculate how much money they have gained or lost during the project. Then, each student will provide their gain or loss which will allow the calculation of your class's average stock performance during the project. [You can project the included table on a board and each student can fill in their gain or loss.]

4. Next, students will find out how the stock market performed on average during the timeframe of the project. They will utilize data from the S&P 500 to see if their class's average was better or worse than the stock market itself.

5. Finally, students will write a reflection about this project. A variety of prompts are included to help your students think about volatility, lower risk of ETFs, and the importance of thinking about how long one can invest their money.

Sample calculations are provided for each step to help model for your students.

What's Included: 6 Page PDF- Ready to Print and Use!

1) Teacher Instructions

2) Day 1: Buy Stocks

3) Check on Stocks 3 Times

4) Calculate Gains, Losses, and Class Average

5) Compare to US500 Performance

6) Written Reflection