MTH1W Unit 6: Money Matters

How can math help us make informed financial decisions? Students learn from real financial situations (1981 mortgage rates, 2022 inflation, the fur-trade made beaver and a phone payment plan), read graphs of appreciation and depreciation, compare simple and compound interest, and find the real cost of borrowing as the rate, the length of a loan and the down payment change, using free loan calculators and spreadsheets. They code a credit card payoff in Python, read budgets as tables, circle graphs and spreadsheets, and rebuild a budget when life changes. Students never need to share real family finances.

Assessment of learning: Wheels and Walls, comparing buying, financing and leasing a car, then rebuilding a first-apartment budget, with a rubric. A unit test with full solutions is also included.

Lessons

1. Learning from Money History
2. Appreciation and Depreciation
3. Simple and Compound Interest
4. The Real Cost of Borrowing
5. Coding a Loan
6. Building a Budget
7. When Life Changes

Plus a unit test class.

What you get

• A teacher lesson plan for every lesson: curriculum expectations, learning goals and success criteria, a timed sequence, differentiation, look-fors and worked answer keys
• Detailed slideshows (15 to 18 slides per lesson) with speaker notes on every slide: what to say, what to ask, what to look for and how long to spend, plus warm-ups, worked examples, guided practice, quick checks and answer-key slides
• Student handouts (usually two pages) and exit tickets, with every problem worked out in the answer key
• Editable Word and PowerPoint files, plus PDFs
• A unit overview, the summative task with a four-level Growing Success rubric, a unit test, and teacher solutions for both

Built for the 2021 Ontario Grade 9 Mathematics curriculum (MTH1W, de-streamed), and easy to adapt for any Grade 9 math class.