How to Teach Accounting and Payroll
Children are never too young to start to learn about money management. All too frequently lessons about proper money usage are delayed until high school. However, starting financial education young can be highly beneficial to students. Despite the potential benefit to students, many teachers shy away from teaching accounting and payroll since these topics can seem rather tedious. However, with some careful planning, you can create lessons that engage students and allow them to see the topics in action. By teaching your students some basics of finance at a young age, you will help set them up for a successful financial future.
Instructions
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Instruct students to create a personal budget. Before students can understand the big world of finance, they need to see how the topic relates to them. Work with students and help them create a personal budget. Have them list their income, such as allowance or money for chores, on one side of the paper and their expenses, like toys or snacks, on the other. Point out to them that subtracting their expenses from their income will show them how much money they have left.
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Graph expenditures to determine where money goes. Using the personal budgets created by the class, create a graph. Categorize your students' expenses and build a simple bar graph so that students can see where most of their money is going. Have your students consider whether they are spending money wisely.
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Explain the connection between a personal budget and a business budget. Show students how business budgeting is very similar to their personal budgeting. Have students come up with lists of ways businesses make money and ways businesses spend money. This will help students see that businesses have to budget just as they do.
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Identify the elements that go into payroll accounting. Explore the different things that a payroll accountant needs to take into account to complete his job. Discuss things like taxes, insurance and retirement so that your students can understand why the number on the check usually isn't what the employee actually earned.
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Create a classroom business to let students practice their skills. Let your students give it a try. Create a mock classroom business and assign different roles to students. Perhaps your students would like to create an art business. You can place some students in management and have them dictate what things need to be done. Have some students work in production to create the art pieces, and have others work in accounting to keep track of the money coming in and going out. Have them buy supplies from you with candy pieces and buy their art from them with the same currency. Students will quickly see how complicated accounting can be.
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Hire a classroom payroll clerk. To keep the students thinking about the payroll lesson they have learned, hire a classroom payroll clerk each week. This clerk can be charged with distributing rewards to students or calculating free time bonuses that the class members have earned. Not only will students have a good time during their week as the payroll clerk, but they will also revisit the lesson that they have learned and keep the concepts of payroll and accounting fresh in their minds.
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