It’s back to school time! Royal Credit Union’s financial education team is excited to see our student Members at our 29 school site locations. We are also busy booking our exciting signature financial education programs like Takeover Day Featuring the Superheroes of Saving, FUSE and Test Drive….Next Stop Reality. We keep VERY busy during the school year visiting classrooms to share age-appropriate financial education lessons and activities. But did you know that our team continues to educate school-aged youth throughout the summer as well? We’d like to share a little more about an amazing summer partnership we have in Minnesota.
For the past several years, we have partnered with the YMCA Twin Cities to offer weekly lessons to the children attending their summer day camps. This year, we partnered with both the YMCA in Apple Valley and the Eden Prairie Eagle Zone school-age care programs. We worked with a total of 435 students between five different locations each week to help them become more knowledgeable about money.
The theme for this year’s 5-week session revolved around being “Money Detectives." A variety of topics were covered in the curriculum: earn, save, share and spend; skip counting; restaurant math; using a budget to buy things such as a meal, materials to make slime, and school supplies; wants and needs; eye spy money identification; coin rubbing; tower building with a supply budget; learning about the characteristics of currency and detecting counterfeit money; and designing your own bill. We kicked off the summer session with our “Superheroes of Savings” conducting our signature Takeover Day program with all of the students.
Royal’s financial educators have created engaging lessons that combine a money-related lesson with a fun activity that lasts about 45 minutes for each age group. We also give the students a small lesson-related prize and a take-home sheet each week. Our goal is to have the students continue the lesson at home with their family members and spark ideas that lead to meaningful conversations.
The 4th-7th grade students at two of the sites participated in our signature FUSE (Future U.S. Entrepreneurs) program in which they use the five weeks to work with partners to create a business, develop a business plan, make a display board and presentation, and present it to a panel of judges on the final day. The top scoring team at each location won a basket full of prizes and bragging rights. The FUSE program is partially funded through a grant from the Minnesota Credit Union Foundation.
Our Financial Education team loves to serve the communities that we are in all year round! If you would like us to come visit your school this year OR you know of an organization that would like to be considered for our summer financial education programming for next year, please reach out to our team at SchoolSense@rcu.org.
