Teaching · First Day
Financial Literacy Icebreakers
First-day money activities for grades 6–12 — and not one of them asks what your students have. Twelve ready-to-run activities for a personal finance, economics, consumer math, career readiness or life skills class. Every one runs on paper and pencils. Every one is about a choice or an opinion, never about a student’s own money, job or family.
One 45-minute period · No prep · No technology · Print and go
The Problem
You have thirty students and no idea what any of them thinks about money
The first day of a finance class is the day you know least about the room. Some students have handled money for years. Some never have. Some will find the topic uncomfortable for reasons you won’t learn until November — and asking on day one is exactly the wrong way to find out.
So these activities don’t ask. Every prompt is about a decision, a trade-off or an opinion. Nothing asks about income, jobs, bank accounts, allowances, benefits, housing, or what anyone’s family can afford.
Students can pass at any point without explaining why, or answer as a made-up person — one rule, named Pass or Play It Fictional, taught in thirty seconds and printed at the top of every student page. You still end the period knowing what your class argues about. That was always the useful part.
Start Here
A complete first period, free
The free sampler isn’t a preview. It’s a full 45-minute lesson: four activities, a teacher plan and the handouts. Walk in with nothing else and you have a first period.
- Find Someone Who — Money Edition. Students circulate and discover what decisions the room has already made.
- Money Would You Rather. Trade-off prompts you can project or hand out.
- My Financial Learning Goals. What your class actually wants from your course.
- First Day Exit Ticket. Three minutes, and you know whether it landed.
- A one-page teacher plan with timings and the privacy rule.
- Nothing to prepare beyond a photocopier.
A free Money Instructor account is required. Print as many copies as you need for your own classroom.
The Full Pack
Twelve activities, and a plan for the whole first day
The complete pack adds eight more activities, expanded teacher notes, and the printable display materials — plus a low-ink version with identical pagination, so you can mix printed sets.
| Activity | Time | What it shows you |
|---|---|---|
| Find Someone Who | 10–15 min | Decisions your students have already made |
| Money Would You Rather | 10–20 min | How they weigh a trade-off — 16 prompts, cards and a projectable |
| Money Values Four Corners | 15–20 min | Where opinion splits, and who will argue — with printable room signs |
| How Would You Use $100? | 15–20 min | Whether they think in one time frame or several |
| Money Myth or Fact | 15–20 min | Which misconceptions are in the room — 10 statements, full answers |
| Money Choices | 15–30 min | How they reason when no answer is right — 12 cut-apart scenario cards |
| Needs vs. Wants: “It Depends” | 10–15 min | Whether they can see context change a category |
| Saving Goal Mini Challenge | 10–15 min | What they’d trade for something they want |
| Vocabulary Confidence Self-Check | 5–10 min | Which topics feel hardest, before you teach |
| Money Question Box | 5 min + ongoing | What they won’t ask out loud — with printable slips |
| My Financial Learning Goals | 7–10 min | What this class wants from your course |
| Exit tickets | 3–5 min | Whether today landed — 4 versions |
Also included: a Day 0 course opener with a timed single-period plan and a two-day plan; expanded teacher notes covering what to listen for, how to debrief and where each activity is heading; a privacy and facilitation page for what never to ask and what to do when a student discloses something anyway; print-once display materials including 4 room signs and 28 cut-apart cards; the printable question slips, which are the one consumable; and color and low-ink versions that paginate identically.
Printing
It’s 50 pages. You’ll print three.
Most of the pack is teacher pages and print-once display materials. The pack itself carries this table, so you can size a run before you start.
| If you’re running… | Per student | Print once |
|---|---|---|
| The single-period Day 0 | 3 | 1 |
| The two-day Day 0 | 5 | 3 |
| One activity, dropped into an existing lesson | 1 | 0–2 |
Teacher pages are for you. Room signs and prompt cards print once and last the year. Question slips are a consumable — one per student each time you run the routine, 8 to a sheet.
Get the Pack
Free sampler, or the whole thing
Free · 6 pages
The sampler
A complete 45-minute first period: four activities, a teacher plan and the handouts. Not a teaser.
Members · 50 pages
The full pack
All twelve activities, the Day 0 course opener, expanded teacher notes, the privacy and facilitation page, and every display material. Color and low-ink paginate identically.
What To Do Next
These tell you what your class thinks. Next, find out what they know.
Two different questions, two different instruments — and Money Instructor answers the second one free.
The free Course Diagnostic
24 questions, about 30 minutes, taken before you teach anything. It reports by unit rather than as a single score, so you can see that a class is solid on bank accounts and lost on credit. Its free Scoring & Placement Guide turns one set of papers into a teaching order.
Then pick a unit
Ten classroom-ready five-day units — banking, budgeting, saving, careers, taxes, credit, renting, insurance, payments and investing — each with a free printable pacing guide, pre-quiz and vocabulary sheet.
How to teach the first week
The planning guide behind this pack — why a money class cannot open with a diagnostic the way other subjects can, which opening questions to swap out and what to ask instead, and four things worth doing before you teach any content. About a five-minute read.
Everything else for the first week
The back-to-school collection — this pack, the two free lessons on school-supply and clothes shopping, the posters and word wall worth putting up before students arrive, and the elementary sets. Grade bands and access are listed on every card.
Needs vs. Wants Sorting Cards
If the “It Depends” discussion goes well, this is the classification work done properly — a cut-apart manipulative rather than a debate.
All free printables
The rest of the free printable library — sorting sets, document-literacy packs, posters, task cards and a print-and-play budget game.
Who It Fits
Middle school and high school, in one pack
Grades 6–8
Find Someone Who, Would You Rather, Four Corners, Needs vs. Wants, the Saving Goal challenge and the exit tickets all run as written. Myth or Fact flags which statements suit this band and which land better later.
Grades 9–12 and adult ed
Everything, plus the extension prompts on each page and the harder Myth or Fact statements on credit, paychecks and price versus value.
Special education and life skills
Both movement activities have seated variants that are the same activity without the walking, not a simplified version. Student pages are written at a grade-6 reading level throughout.
Homeschool
The pair and small-group activities work with two people, and Find Someone Who has a seated version designed for a small group.
Questions
Before you print
Do students need to share anything personal?
No. Nothing in the pack asks about income, jobs, accounts, allowances, benefits, housing or family circumstances. Every activity is about a hypothetical choice or an opinion, and every student page carries the same rule: you can pass, or answer as a made-up person.
What if a student volunteers something personal anyway?
The pack has a full page on this — how to acknowledge it without amplifying it, how to move from the person to the situation, and when to follow up privately. It also flags the three existing Money Instructor lessons that open with a personal spending question, and gives you a swap for each one.
Is there an answer key?
Only where there are answers. Money Myth or Fact has full explanations for all 10 statements. Everything else is open discussion or a reasoned trade-off, and each teacher page says which of the three it is, so you know what you’re listening for.
Can I project these instead of printing?
Partly. Money Would You Rather has a projectable page carrying all 16 prompts, and the room signs and both sets of scenario cards are display pages too. The Four Corners and Myth or Fact statements are printed on their teacher pages to read aloud, and on the student pages — there is no separate projectable for those two. Three activities need no student handout at all.
Is there a low-ink version?
Yes — the full 50 pages, paginating identically to the color version, so you can mix printed sets without the page numbers drifting apart.
Will these work if my students have never taken a finance class?
That’s what they’re for. Nothing assumes prior knowledge, and the Vocabulary Confidence Self-Check is designed for a class that hasn’t started yet — it rates confidence, not knowledge, and carries no definitions and no word list.
Can I use these later in the year?
Yes. They’re written for a first day but nothing is seasonal — they work for a new semester, a new unit, a midyear start, summer school, or as a no-prep substitute plan.
How long does each activity take?
Between 3 and 30 minutes. The chooser table near the front of the pack lists every activity by time, so you can fill whatever gap you have.
Membership
The full pack comes with Full Membership
Full Membership at Money Instructor includes this pack and everything else on the teaching side — ten five-day curriculum units with complete teacher kits, the worksheet generators, the printable library and the classroom simulations.
The free sampler is genuinely free and genuinely complete. Start there.
Ask what students would do. Not what they have.
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