Happy Saturday friends! I am so excited to share about a NEW resource in the Caravan Sonnet Classroom! The $100 Fall Budget Challenge which is a real-life budgeting activity for high school students!
There is something about fall that seems to invite us to spend money.
Pumpkin patches. Apple orchards. Coffee dates. Fall festivals. Football games. Weekend trips. Seasonal decorations. Dinners with friends. Concerts. Haunted attractions. And, of course, all of the beautiful fall experiences that seem to fill our social media feeds as soon as September arrives.
Individually, many of these things may not seem particularly expensive. But added together? Fall can become surprisingly costly. And that makes this season an incredible opportunity to talk with students about something that goes far beyond simply creating a budget:
How do we use limited financial resources to create a life that reflects what actually matters to us?
That question became the foundation for one of the newest resources in the Caravan Sonnet Classroom shop: The $100 Fall Budget Challenge, a seasonal personal-finance budgeting simulation designed for high school and college students.
Because Personal Finance Is About More Than Spending Less
One thing that I feel strongly about when teaching personal finance is that we have to be careful not to accidentally teach students that the person who spends the least amount of money automatically makes the “best” financial decision.
That isn't necessarily true. Financial literacy is about learning how to make intentional decisions with limited resources. Sometimes saving is the wisest choice. Sometimes spending is completely reasonable. Sometimes a free experience can provide significantly more value than an expensive one. And sometimes something that looks affordable at first becomes much less affordable once another expense appears.
Those are the types of decisions our students are eventually going to have to make in real life. So instead of giving students a list of expenses and asking them simply to make the numbers balance, I wanted to create a budgeting activity that asks them to think.
The premise is simple: Students rank priorities and then have to use those priorities to help guide the decisions that follow. And I love this part of the activity because suddenly budgeting isn't just arithmetic. It becomes personal decision-making.
Students Then Have to Build Their Fall
Students choose from a menu of realistic fall experiences ranging from completely free activities to significantly more expensive choices. But because this is a high school / early college level resource students have a variety of different requirements for this activity, including the experience that real budgets don't always go according to plan.
This creates amazing conversations about trade-offs and opportunity cost because instead of memorizing a vocabulary definition, students actually experience what it means to choose one thing and give up another. I also created a special section all about social media which invites conversations about the reality that we cannot determine someone's financial health by looking at what they appear to consume. And we shouldn't determine the value of our own experiences that way either.
What Does a Wonderful Fall Actually Have to Cost?
Students are also challenged in this activity to design an entire $0 fall day. But instead of simply saying “everything is free,” students have to identify the resources they are using instead of clear out-of-pocket spending which is important because the goal isn't to pretend that everything in life is literally free. It is to help students recognize that money is only one resource available to us when creating meaningful experiences.
Price and Value Are Not the Same Thing
Another important piece of this activity asks students to compare experience and value. That is a financial skill I want students carrying with them long after they leave the classroom.
I love seasonal classroom resources- even as a high school teacher and college professor. I love finding ways to make learning feel connected to the time of year students are actually experiencing.
But I also believe seasonal resources can still be academically meaningful and rigorous.
The $100 Fall Budget Challenge isn't fall-themed simply for the sake of putting pumpkins on a worksheet. Fall provides the context. Financial decision-making is the lesson.
You can find the complete The $100 Fall Budget Challenge in the Caravan Sonnet Classroom at Teachers Pay Teachers HERE!
And to those of you who have purchased, used, reviewed, recommended, and returned to Caravan Sonnet Classroom resources over the years—thank you. Watching these resources grow from individual classroom materials into an intentional Personal Finance curriculum for high school and college students has been such an incredible gift. Every purchase, review, message, and recommendation helps this classroom continue to grow and allows me to keep creating resources designed to help students approach their financial futures with greater knowledge, confidence, and wisdom.
If you would like to check out the shoppe you can find it HERE!
I want to say a HUGE thank you again for ALL of your support of my shoppe! This is truly an incredible blessing to see how many things are helping teachers and helping students!! This has been an incredible blessing and you are making this possible!!
Thank you so much for being part of this journey, friends!
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