Last year, it suddenly occurred to me that my kids were growing up much faster than I had realized. Soon enough they would be leaving home and on their own to make all those important “adult” decisions. I had always intended to share with them my love and knowledge of investing, but if I didn’t get to it soon, my opportunity would be lost.

It was about this time that I told my oldest I wanted to teach her financial literacy.  In that snarky voice that only a teenager can perfect, she replied, “Do you have a syllabus?”

Well.

I found a book.  I planned out a twelve week course covering everything from taxes and budgeting to stock investing and entrepreneurship.

I was so proud of it!  Here it was, a full-fledged actual planned out course for the first time in my parenting career!  (I tend to be one of those fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants parents and we tend towards the unschooling philosophy of education where we learn what we learn and don’t really make a plan for it.)

She was not impressed.

I plowed ahead anyways.  Except now I was SO excited about this course I had designed, that I didn’t want to keep it a secret. I wanted to share it with other potential students who could benefit! I offered it at our local homeschool co-op.

Two people signed up.

The first dropped out after two weeks because she wasn’t interested in doing any of the homework.

The second was an exchange student from Japan who struggled to keep up. I don’t know if she ever completed the investing part, although she did get pretty far and I gave her the materials to complete the rest.

 In the meantime, I forced my kids through all the work.

All the worksheets.

By hand.

With a pencil.

They made it! They achieved my goal of finishing the course!

They will probably be the only ones who EVER finish that particular version of my course.

You see, I had the best of intentions, but I knew going into it that it is hard to keep the attention of kids on a potentially “boring” project.

And stock investing can be pretty dry and boring!

All those terms you don’t know.

All those numbers that fluctuate up and down.

All those Excel spreadsheets! 

I made it as relatable and interesting as I could at the time.

But I’ve learned a little something since then.

I’ve been studying how to produce a course for the masses hosted by the internet. 

And how to make it enough like a game to keep kids interested and students from dropping out, defeated.

And I am SO Excited to be reworking this program to share with more teenagers!

Introduce some common investing vocabulary to yourself or your student with this simple Scrambled Worksheet.