It’s My Money Week this week (8 – 12 June) and if you’re homeschooling, have teens at home, or are thinking about the next life stage for your offspring, here are some great resources to help you teach your children about money.
Young Enterprise
Young Enterprise is the charity behind My Money Week and aims to provide young people with the opportunity to learn the vital skills needed to earn and look after their money. In 2014, the Personal Finance Education Group (pfeg) merged with Young Enterprise and became Young Money. They have developed a number of financial toolkits including one aimed at parents.
Money Advice Service
In 2019, the Money and Pensions Service created one organisation from the three existing providers of money guidance, including the Money Advice Service (MAS). However, there’s still a lot of great advice on the MAS website, broken down into different age groups, to help parents use appropriate ‘money’ language and find suitable activities to teach children about money.
Visit the Money Advice Service
Young Money Blog
Iona Bain is an award-winning journalist and the go-to voice on young people’s money issues. As well as writing her own blog, you may have seen her being interviewed on television and being quoted in the national press. Her blog is aimed at older children and those starting out on the career ladder. It encompasses a great range of advice based articles as well as topical news features.
The Money Charity
Again, this is another resource aimed at slightly older children who are about to head off to university. Their student money manual is a good resource to help families budget for this exciting phase in their child’s life and is particularly helpful if they’re not confident at dealing with their finances when they’re about to leave home for the first time.
BBC Bitesize
The BBC’s education platform has gone from strength to strength during the COVID-19 situation and contains loads of information that will help teach children about money and to become more confident with it. There’s information on the basics of money, such as understanding coinage and currency, through to resources about making sound financial decisions and understanding wages and salary.
MyBnk
MyBnk is another relatively new resource that has put much of its face-to-face resources online to support parents, children and young adults during this phase of homeschooling. The charity’s materials range from quizzes to podcasts, making sure that financial education is anything but boring.
TES
The TES is a resource often used by teachers to find helpful worksheets and other written tasks to use in the classroom. If your broadband is slow, you’d prefer your children to take a break from screen time, or more traditional teaching methods are more your thing, you’ll find a whole range of downloadable worksheets (some paid) available on this site.
Teach children about money
Even the best mathematicians aren’t necessarily adept at dealing with the practicalities of their finances, and so it’s vitally important that parents take the time to teach their children about money. For some this will come more naturally than for others, so if you’re stuck or just need a few pointers, then head to one of the resources above.
For additional My Money Week information, please see our other blog post on why you should open a children’s savings account and use lockdown as an opportunity to start encouraging good savings habits amongst your children.
