"Financial education: I teach it!” is the new didactic manual created together with primary school teachers and born from the collaboration between the North Milan Community Foundation, the Credito Valtellinese Foundation and the Foundation for Financial Education and Savings - FEduF with the support of the Research Unit on Theory of Mind of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan and of the Lombardy Regional School Office.
The manual is the result of a two-year journey marked by the development of materials for inserting financial education in the educational offer plans of primary schools, which involved over 150 children and 15 teachers from 10 institutes in the northern Milan area, in addition to the schools that carried out the lessons in the classroom. The handbook collects real-life tasks, learning units and stories that can be used in the classroom and can be downloaded free of charge from the website www.economiascuola.it.
“Financial education: I teach it!” was created for the purpose of suggest to teachers and parents a didactic path capable of increasing the financial literacy of the youngest and promoting the development of didactics for financial education skills as a combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes appropriate to the context. Not only rules and notions then, but also suggestions to promote ethical behaviors that determine the minute gestures of purchasing, saving, debt, deferring spending, social security and solidarity.
“Teaching by skills – he explains Giovanna Boggio Robutti, director general of the FEduF – implies that teachers assume an ever more incisive role in the formation of independent and responsible citizens, facilitating and coordinating everyone's learning. The student is placed at the center of the didactic action and the work in class focuses on the experience, contextualised in reality and developed effectively through the implementation of significant tasks”.
"We chose to start from school and from the youngest - comments Fraola Pessina president of the North Milan Community Foundation - and thanks to passionate teachers, we managed to develop concrete basic courses, consistent with the general programming, and training actions. Working with children on the conscious use of money and savings, an aptitude for appreciation and care for resources is built in them, as well as the propensity to share them fairly for the common good of the group they belong to: family, class or company of friends”.
