Last week I got an email from the Council for Economic Education. The email listed the ten most popular resources on their site. Two of them stood out to me and one of them led me to an additional resource that wasn’t included in the email. 

The Compound Interest Calculator is the most popular resource on the Council for Economic Education’s website. It does exactly what the name states. Students enter age, interest rate, initial investment, and monthly savings to see how much they’ll save and earn over time. There are lots of tools like this one on the web. The nice thing about this one is that it’s not surrounded by a zillion ads for mortgages and investment brokers. 

Renting a Place to Live is the ninth most popular resource offered by the Council for Economic Education. It is a free lesson plan that is designed to help students understand the process of finding a place to live and the true cost of renting a place to live. The lesson plan includes some handouts for students to use to identify the costs associated with renting. 

A resource not mentioned in the CEE’s email was Economics in Children’s Literature. I discovered that collection by going down a virtual rabbit hole of related resources after looking at the Renting a Place to Live lesson plan. Economics in Children’s Literature is a collection of lesson plans for introducing economics concepts to elementary school students through the use of literature. For example, this lesson plan about scarcity is centered on reading Jan Brett’s story, The Mitten (a story my own kids love).