One such club taking an active role within its community is Championship League club Brighton & Hove Albion with its extensive Albion in the Community initiatives. Having participated for many years in the ‘Playing for Success’ scheme, the club now runs numerous community programmes in the areas of disability, education, health and the environment. It became an Apple Regional Training Centre last year, enabling youngsters from throughout Sussex to participate in learning sessions at the AMEX Stadium, using the very latest technology. It has also devised programmes for young adults who aren’t in education or employment and partners companies throughout the region in delivering a range of work placements and training opportunities with its Opt-In Plus scheme.

‘Premier League Reading Stars,’ run in conjunction with the National Literacy Trust, has just launched its 2013 programme aimed at pupils in Years 5 & 6 struggling to reach the end of Key Stage expectations. 1,000 schools received a free resource pack, and any other school can participate and buy their own pack, which includes a host of Premier League branded incentives.

If you’re looking to extend learning outside the classroom why not consider the following ideas to help bring learning to life for your pupils:

• Are you based near a large football club running education schemes that you can take part in?
• If your pupils aren’t sports mad, pick a different topic that you know they enjoy, like music or fashion. Devise a name for your project and put together your own branded resource packs such as notebooks, badges, pens and certificates.
• Does your class have its own Facebook page? It’s a great way to encourage them to see the value of literacy and numeracy – in an everyday environment that they’re all familiar with. Don’t worry if you’re not social media savvy – the kids will love ‘showing teacher’ how it works!
• Could you partner up with a team of parents to promote a ‘Dads & Lads’ initiative with a series of challenges – all utilising key numeracy, literacy and IT skills. Prizes could include branded wristbands, keyrings or Dads & Lads bookmarks.
• For teachers of younger students The National Literacy Trust has lots of resources in their Young Reader Programme and for those about to leave school, their Words for Work programme partners secondary school students with volunteers from the corporate world. Their Words for Work competition 2013 has recently been launched and the deadline isn’t until the end of June so there’s still plenty of time to enter.

And if you really want to get your children involved, register for updates from the Join In Local Sports 2013 website and encourage your class to get active over their summer break. With over 1,000 activities already registered and schemes throughout the country, Join In could be just the start they need to see them racing into the summer.

Further Reading

Albion in the Community
http://www.albioninthecommunity.org.uk

The National Literacy Trust – Premier League Reading Stars
http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/plrs_challenges_home

The National Literacy Trust
http://www.literacytrust.org.uk

The National Literacy Trust – Young Reader Programme
http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/nyrp

The National Literacy Trust – Words for Work Competition
http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/words_for_work

Join In – Join In Local Sports 2013
https://www.joininuk.org/about

In these days of near universal ownership of mobile devices, the reporting of news has become almost instantaneous and with eye witness accounts often the first thing we see, current events don’t stay ‘current’ for very long.

Given the plethora of websites with sketchy, biased, inaccurate or wholly false information it can therefore be challenging to determine what qualifies as ‘real’ news,

Nevertheless, there is a place in the classroom for current events, either taken directly from a reputable newspaper or other reliable source. Reading and discussing the news on a daily basis should give students a healthy interest in the world around them. And what’s more controversial topics can stimulate classroom debate and allow young people to see themselves as potential agents of change.

The news can also be used across the curriculum to add variety, texture and context to many lessons. Whilst language classes may study the traditional format of news writing, they might also make use of the paper for off-beat, fun activities such as:

• Send students on a newspaper scavenger hunt for different parts of speech. Make it fun by allowing them to choose which section (news, entertainment, sports, travel) to search. Provide highlighters so they can colour-code nouns, verbs, adjectives within the features.

• The news is often full of flamboyant headlines. Ask pupils to spot adjectives from A to Z. They can underline the words and list them in their notebooks.

• For young students, current topical news presents a chance for them to use the Internet to search for information both at school and at home as part of their homework. Help parents to keep their children safe online by sending home guidelines printed on mousemats or as a printed hand-out.

• Choose a news story with facts and figures that could be turned into a graph. The rising cost of petrol, for example, or the population within a country or continent. Challenge students to create graphs that show the information clearly. A ruler is a necessity!

• Make maths fun – create an exercise based on house prices to add a twist to a maths lesson. Ask students to find the average price of ten homes advertised for sale near their homes or to the school, ask them to compare the number of rooms and other details such if they have a garden or garage as well as the proximity to local schools, shops etc.

• Give students a weekly shopping list and ask them to compare the prices of key items across 3 major supermarket websites for a couple of weeks. This could be presented back as a graph as well as students working out the % savings between each retailer and the average price of particular items – arm them with a notebook and pen to record their results!

• Hang a world map on the wall and ask students to identify countries in the news or pull out the weather pages and ask them to identify the cities listed in the city temperature listings for all over the world.

• Ask older students to critique business or political articles in the paper. Did the journalist explain the overall issue clearly? Is any important information missing from the article? Is the reporting biased to make a particular point?

Current events are an important part of life for young people and will shape their future. With a bit of creativity they can complement traditional learning and provide an additional, topical and rich source of material to connect students to the world around them.

Type ‘financial literacy’ into Google and it’ll return over 5 million results featuring scary statistics and new strategies for improving the world’s growing financial literacy challenges.

Whilst we are absolutely NOT encouraging students going to university to apply for a credit card, there are some interesting statistics that came out of an American study conducted on behalf of Wells Fargo Bank and Visa. The study looked at the effect of even a small amount of financial education on the issue of future debt and the ability to manage your finances.

By comparing data from two test groups of college-going cardholders, where only one group participated in an online credit education programme, the findings were astounding. Cardholders who completed just two online lessons with quizzes were less likely than their counterparts to:

• File for bankruptcy in the years following completion of their course (51.2%)

• Have credit card bills 60 days past their due date (45.1%)

• Incur late payment fees (22.8%)

This is just one of the studies proving that students exposed to financial education have a greater chance of being more financially literate than their peers. Teachers, this is where you come in!

Game-based learning
Researchers believe that one of the reasons the Wells Fargo experiment was such a success was the use of online learning. Online learning environments, especially when they include educational games, have been found to increase students’ interaction level with the subject, therefore improving retention.

Teachers can access the (US site) Practical Money Skills for Life microsite to bring the same online learning used in the study into the classroom. The financial education games are free and suitable for all ages. But, online games are not the only way to bring financial planning into your classroom. There are a plethora of sites offering advice to students considering applying for an apprenticeship, a bursary or student loan, including travel and living costs as well as tuition fees; including those from the Government and Student Loans Company.

With literally hundreds of website offering advice on setting up a bank account, paying bills, eating well, balancing the books, work and study we particularly like the 19 Essential Money Tips for Students produced by ShrewdCookie.com. Originally written in 2010, the advice still holds good, although you can now earn £8,105 without paying income tax.

Budget simulations can be a great way to teach about financial literacy. Keep lessons simple by asking students to develop a budget for themselves for the next month (possibly using the free income and expenditure spreadsheet available from shrewdcookie.com). Hand out calculators to track of their progress, logging everything from allowance money ‘credits’ to lunch money ‘debits’.

You can take your budget simulation to the next level by holding a financial simulation event. Begin with each student choosing a career that they would like to have in the coming years and help them decide a reasonable salary. Set up ‘decision desks’ where students make decisions about where to live, what kind of car to drive, how much to save, and other expenses and lifestyle choices. At each desk, students should receive an ‘expense card’ associated with each decision. Don’t forget to have someone handing out ‘speed bump’ cards to factor in life’s unexpected expenses.

During the event, get the students to collect all of their ‘expense cards’ in a plastic wallet (make it an annual event and reuse them year after year). At the end of the event, ask students to add up their total expenses against their yearly salary and post their total on display board. Close the event with an impromptu awards ceremony, rewarding students who were able to make financial decisions that allowed them to stick within their budget. Simple rewards like a stress shaped £, a pencil made of recycled money or a printed money box bearing your logo can reinforce the students new-found financial understanding.