NGPF Fellow Maureen Neuner is consistently in touch with us here at NGPF, which we love love love! Her most recent feedback seemed worth sharing, as it might entice some of you to check out our credit units for use next year. Here’s Maureen’s email [with comments from Jessica in brackets]…

Happy Friday! I just wanted to give you some feedback on the credit unit I just completed. Every year I feel like I redo my lessons for credit because there is so much information out there and after I’m done, I realize there was something I missed while we were doing the unit. So this year, I just used NGPF for the whole thing. I used Types of Credit and Managing Credit and it was awesome. It covered everything. The concepts all flowed together so nicely and I really liked all the activities that you have included. I especially like that an activity follows a lesson that will help cement what they learned. I usually use some of your lessons and some from the Federal Reserve and Practical Money Skills, but I’m switching and using just NGPF. (I was a little worried about the surfer dude video but the kids loved it! We all really liked the video that explained how loans get paid down too.)

The kids actually said I should include more videos in my lessons because it makes it easier to learn that way. I said to them that sometimes you don’t pay attention and they said, “Then threaten us with a worksheet. We will pay attention!”

I am having them do the credit score calculator project now that we worked on in our PLC and they are doing great. [As a result of Summer Institute last year, Maureen took on the challenge of creating her own NGPF-inspired activity, and then she workshopped it in an online PLC this year. The NGPF original version is here, available in English & Spanish.] As they were inputting Sam Spendthrift’s information, they were all commenting about how bad his credit score will be. It’s such a good feeling to see them applying what we taught them.

With that being said, I am going to tell you again thank you for all you guys do. I know you’re a teacher and realize how much time we spend on lesson plans, but what you have put together far exceeds anything that I would ever have the time or talent to do. [Maureen is too modest — she’s a PHENOMENAL teacher!]

My next unit is Insurance and I’m excited to use all your lessons for that subject too.

Have a great weekend!

Maureen

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.