What does managing your credit have to do with Pi Day? Hint: It's not a tasty crust or a gooey cherry filling. 

It's the classic pie chart representing the factors that go into determining your credit score, which your students can learn a ton about by watching this Kal Penn/Mashable video featured in Semester Course Lesson 5.3 - Your Credit Score. 

This Pi Day, I want to use SC-5.3 Your Credit Score to walk you through the recipe for a delicious NGPF Semester Course lesson. Here's what to expect:

An Intro

Most commonly, an NGPF lesson will kick off with a Prompt for students to think, write, or chat about. Sometimes, instead of a standard prompt on the Student Activity Packet, we'll go with a Question of the Day from the extensive NGPF catalog of QODs. And, on occasion we'll start the lesson with something more daring -- a FinCap Friday, an Interactive, or maybe, like in SC-5.3, a Data Crunch. At NGPF, we love Data Crunches because they give the opportunity to infuse a LITTLE bit of math without going deep into calculation mode, and they support the general academic skills of reading charts/graphs and analyzing data. 

Learn It

Each Semester Course lesson has a Learn It section, which is a sequence of resources expertly curated by an NGPF curriculum team member (or members) to teach your students factual content about the lesson's topic. For example, in SC-5.3, the Learn It resources break down as follows:

1. The Kal Penn video mentioned above, followed by three comprehension questions pulled straight from the video and one opinion question about whether credit scoring seems fair
2. A second video that dives deeper specifically into the credit utilization calculation as part of credit score, with three questions you could assign to students, have them work on in groups, or use for discussion
3. An article from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which students must skim to find 4 ways to access their credit score

Do It

Each lesson will have a Do It section, too, which typically links out to an NGPF resource that will achieve one of the following: Dive deeper into one portion of what they've learned in the lesson; introduce new content in an engaging, hands-on fashion; practice a specific skill that they've learned; or simulate a decision, document analysis, or financial scenario they may encounter in their real lives. In the case of SC-5.3, the Do It activity is INTERACTIVE: FICO Credit Scores, which utilizes an online calculator from FICO; the NGPF portion of the activity is available in English and as a Spanish translation.  

Exit Ticket

Finally, every Semester Course lesson will end with an Exit Ticket -- exactly 3 multiple-choice questions, each with 4 answer choices and only one right answer each. You can give Exit Tickets on slips of paper or as a Google Form which will self grade. Or, you're the teacher -- you can skip the Exit Tickets or go over them aloud instead if you prefer. The Exit Ticket is found only on the Lesson Guide, also known as the Answer Key. The Lesson Guide also includes the National Standards for Personal Financial Education alignment for the lesson, a Do More/Learn More box of additional resources to extend the learning, valuable Teacher Tips, and more. 

Once you understand the anatomy of one lesson, using Semester Course is easy as pie! Happy Pi Day!

About the Author

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.