THUNDER BAY -- Heather Lewis is one of the lucky ones.
Home-schooled for several years, the 13-year-old’s mother taught her all about budgeting and its importance, teaching the Grade 8 Sir Winston Churchill Collegiate and Vocational Institute student that there’s no such thing as a bottomless pit of money.
On Tuesday Grade 7 and 8 students got a similar lesson, using a hands-on approach with the help of Science North.
Heather said it’s a great way for the lesson to hit home.
“They teach it to you in a fun way. If you learn stuff in a fun way it makes it easier to remember because you say, ‘I remember doing that because I had fun also.’ So it helps a lot,” she said.
Classmate Reece Napper said the timing of the project couldn’t be better. Although he likely won’t be looking for work in the mining industry – the class used an imaginary mine as an example – learning the constraints of a budget is a good lesson to learn.
“We’re about to get into the real world, where we’re 14 and need to find a job,” the 13-year-old said.
“We want to make money somehow, so we need to learn how to spend our money and why we want to keep our money and save our money.”
Erin Campbell, a staff scientist at Science North said the idea was simple. Use science and math in an entertaining way to teach.
“We want kids to be able to build a budget when they get older and save for things that they want to save for. Science North is all about hands-on, engaging science. It’s all about making math and science fun,” Campbell said.
“We’re all about relevant learning. If kids can learn to make a budget and they can use those skills later in life, that’s a great thing.”
Students were given an imaginary mine to run, and had to decide which equipment to buy to extract the most profit from their claim.
