My Money Mathematics Resources

Mathematics has a huge role to play in helping young people to achieve the Economic Wellbeing outcome of the Every Child Matters agenda. This is done by giving young people opportunities to obtain the skills to model, analyze and interpret financial situations so they can make informed decisions about their spending, saving and borrowing. Moreover, the teaching of mathematics is giving greater and greater emphasis to functional skills – using real life contexts as a framework for young people to learn their mathematics and make sense of the world.

The publication comprises six themes built around different practical aspects of money. They are:
- What is it? – local trading schemes leading to currency exchange
- Earning it – the world of work and take home pay
- Spending it – buying and running a car
- Investing it – savings accounts and investing in shares
- Risking it – gambling and fruit machines
- Being enterprising with it – setting up an ice-cream business (geometric investigation)

The activities can be used for starter–main–plenary lesson plans and built into units of several consecutive lessons as recommended by National Strategies. They can be used to consolidate learning after mathematical skills have been learnt and where pupils are not learning new content but are working on problems that arise in other subjects and in contexts beyond the school.