The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s Battle of the Classrooms

Last year, my class did a virtual field trip with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland for budgeting. When they decided to do a Battle of the Classrooms in honor of April being Financial Literacy Month, they reached out to me to see if my class this year would like to participate. In order to prepare for the battle, the class completed several activities. One activity had the students looking into being a savvy shopper. They were pretending to develop a community garden and had to shop for tools and equipment to help them maintain it with a budget of $200. After comparing online prices from 2 stores, we had a discussion on different options for spending our $200. A second activity had them complete an online module about spending where they learned a variety of different vocabulary terms such as wants, needs, debt, and opportunity cost. They also learned about different forms of payment like cash, check, debit card, credit card, and mobile payment apps. Lastly, the most fun activity for them were the logic puzzles. They were presented with information in a story with clues along with a grid. Using their logic-based reasoning skills, they had to figure out the answers by using the process of elimination. They only had to complete one before the actual battle; however, they enjoyed them so much that they wanted to complete all 6 of them, which grew progressively harder. The actual competition was on May 3rd through Zoom. It lasted about 30 minutes. They were presented with problems that the entire class worked on together to come up with a final answer. Then I submitted their answers through Kahoot! They were up against two other classrooms from two other states. The competition was challenging and fun. It was a close battle. We came in 2nd place. Each class received a certificate of participation, and every student received a bag holding a tiny fraction of the $4.2 billion in shredded money the Cleveland bank destroys each year. I look forward to participating in it again next year and having other classes in the school joining me as well.

-Mrs. Wolfe , 4th Grade Teacher