High School Business and Personal Finance

This is an engaging, project-based course that builds the following skills:

• Businesses, competition, and new ideas
• Marketing
• Personal saving and borrowing
• Basic business finance and accounting
• Management and strategy
• Personal goals, budgeting, and investing

Skills developed through the project-based environment of this course include:

• Entrepreneurship
• Decision-making
• Communication
• Collaboration

There is an AP track option for this course that has extended learning, materials and support for AP students.

Required Course Materials:

• Small (2″) 3 ring binder with 3 dividers (more dividers are fine)
  • Standard lined/”filler” paper
• Access to a Google Drive under the student’s own e-mail address
• Basic calculator at home for homework

Additionally, students will need technical ability to access Zoom, Discovery Education Streaming, OERCommons, Study.com and Canvas (our learning management system).

At home, students will need access to the internet (home or library) to look up information, related published materials and/or videos and do work through our class learning management system.  Some videos will be subscription-based and issued by illuminat-ED (all students will have accounts for Discovery Streaming and Study.com for additional video support).  Some videos will be freely available.

Amount of time will depend on your student’s speed/fluency with writing, reading or the topic at hand and the content of the week. Families should allocate approximately 3 hours/week to complete various assigned labs, tasks or group collaboration that might require internet access in preparation for live class. Some of this can be done during Flex Work Time at our facility.

Students pursuing AP level coursework: should allocate approximately 7-9 hours/week to completing a broad range of tasks including online work in AP Classroom and other resources.  Keep in mind that AP U.S. Government & Politics is a college level course and covers one college semesters of economics.  AP students will be offered an additional hour/week of  Zoom-based “office hours” that can be scheduled based on the instructor’s and student’s mutual availability.

These courses have 2 pre-scheduled Asynchronous Learning weeks during Fall Pause & Mid-winter Pause; but does not have additional assigned work during Thanksgiving Week, Winter Break or Spring Break.

Combined with our live class time, the regular version of this course is a total of 4-1/2 hours/week (except for our 2 asynchronous weeks which will have 2 hours of work) for a course total of approximately 150 hours for the year.  This equates to one full credit using the Carnegie unit methodology.

In the first class, we will cover note-taking skills and some basic project management skills of time management, planning and organization (which will be revisited regularly in the course).

Live class time will assume students have done their pre-reading, online content and any offline case studies, fieldwork, etc. (if any). We will be collaboratively sharing and discussing results in the context of the assigned readings and asynchronous work in addition to doing practical and group activities.