In one of our recent We Wanna Know Wednesday prompts, we asked the FinLit Fanatics! Facebook Group the following:

Some of our own favorites made the cut! Here are the 5 NGPF resource types you shared most often that were the easiest-to-implement in your classrooms.

1. Arcade Games
2. FinCap Fridays
3. Pre-built Nearpod Lessons
4. Data Crunches
5. Interactives

PLUS a BONUS plug for the NGPF Search Button, which makes finding free NGPF resources easy and fast!

1. Arcade Games

Games make your classroom fun and memorable, not to mention an even more effective learning environment! Did you know NGPF has built or curated 11 free online Arcade Games? Use them to game-ify your lessons on financial skills, such as avoiding predatory lenders (e.g. Shady Sam: Loan Shark) and investing for the long-term (e.g. Build Your STAX).

Try an NGPF Arcade Game today, or follow these teachers' recommendations!

2. FinCap Fridays

FinCap Friday is NGPF's free, weekly current events activity featuring Yanely Espinal, NGPF's Director of Educational Outreach who is known on YouTube as @missbehelpful.

Yanely creates a weekly:

• quiz game (you can do this with or without tech),
• explainer video (again, how you show this is flexible), and
• discussion prompt (you guessed it... also super flexible)...

...about a current event in personal finance or economics. We then package those three activities into one Google Slide deck and send them out via the NGPF Blog every Friday during the school year.

Your students will absolutely LOVE FinCap Fridays. They're so much fun and easy-to-implement in any classroom... SO easy, in fact, that FinCap Friday games have been played over 2 million times on Kahoot!

Try March 17th, 2022's FinCap Friday: Who Likes Rate Hikes? for a look at this popular current events resource!

3. Pre-built Nearpod Lessons

Students have engaged in over 4 million sessions on NGPF-created Nearpod Slides in the last 2 years. Nearpod is a 'freemium' student engagement platform in which students join interactive slide decks (either live or self-paced) with activities like polls, Time to Climb quiz games, collaborate boards, matching activities and more.

Led by Senior Project Manager Tori Mansfield, NGPF has painstakingly converted the vast majority of our Curriculum into FREE, pre-built Nearpod Slides so any teacher can benefit from this engaging learning platform!

You can try almost any NGPF Lesson in Nearpod format. Pre-built NGPF Nearpod Slides are available for the High School 9-Week Course, High School Semester Course, Middle School 9-Week Course, and Mini-Units. Visit the course pages to add the Nearpod slide decks to your Nearpod Account.

4. Data Crunches

NGPF Data Crunches are a sprinkle of graph literacy, a dash of data analysis, and a handful of inference-making. These compact activities can also print on one-side of one page, so they're easy to implement in your classroom via pencil and paper, Google Classroom, or even as a homework assignment.

Explore our entire Data Crunch Library by content area, or try this cool teacher's "Weekly Crunch" routine!

5. Interactives

Interactives are like the brainy cousins of Arcade Games. In these data-driven online activities, students analyze and change graphs, manipulate variables in online whiteboards, and explore datasets to identify trends. Each interactive explores a different financial question, such as "How much will your College actually cost?" or, "What is the most common job in my state?"

Charts and graphs can sometimes be intimidating for students, especially if they haven't had a lot of practice. Together, NGPF Data Crunches and Interactives allow students to practice these challenging skills while evaluating real-life personal finance scenarios!

Try NGPF Interactives here!

BONUS: The NEW Search Button

We're the first to admit that NGPF has SO MANY free resources available for teachers that it can sometimes be overwhelming. Where do you start? Well, the new Search Button! Just glance up at the top of any NGPF webpage (including this one) and you'll see the search function. It's one of the fastest ways to find resources for any personal finance concept.

About the Authors

Ren Makino

Ren started interning at NGPF in 2014, and worked part-time through high school and college. With his knowledge growing alongside NGPF, he joined the team to work full-time after graduating from college in 2020. He is also the producer of the NGPF podcast. During his free time, he likes to try out coffees from different roasters across the world.

Jessica Endlich

When I started working at Next Gen Personal Finance, it's as though my undergraduate degree in finance, followed by ten years as an educator in an NYC public high school, suddenly all made sense.