Sure, NGPF offers high school personal finance courses for 9-Weeks and a Full Year, but the real magic happens in our flagship Semester Course. If you want to make sure you're using the best of the best lessons but don't have time for the full Semester Course, here are our recommendations for trimming Semester Course to be a trimester or quarter instead. 

Suggestion 1: Just the basics

Focus on the most immediately useful topics for young people, skipping the more advanced topics or skills they'll need later in life. 

Suggestion 2: Skip units your school addresses elsewhere

Maybe you're one of the lucky schools with a whole semester devoted to Investing -- you could skip that unit. Here are some other questions you could ask: 

• Does your school have a college advisement office, a dynamic set of guidance counselors, and/or a course devoted to college readiness? You may be able to skip Paying for College.
• Do most of your students have plans other than a 4-year college? If so, make Paying for College an independent study and/or substitute in the NGPF Mini-unit Alternatives to 4-Year Colleges
• Do many of your same students take Family and Consumer Science courses? If so, you may be able to skip Budgeting and/or Consumer Skills.
• Does every senior have an advisory, senior seminar, or "adulting" style course? If so, check the syllabus and see what's covered there so you don't duplicate.

Suggestion 3: Align to standards

If you teach according to the National Standards for Personal Financial Education, the best aligned units would look roughly like this: 

And, of course, if your state or district has its own standards it wants you to follow, use the unit plans for all 10 Semester Course units to review the learning objectives of each lesson and decide which you should keep or skip to make sure you're meeting local expectations. 

Suggestion 4: Cut individual lessons

One thing that makes NGPF special is our attention to more niche (but important!) topics and our inclusion of interactive, student-led, deep diving activities. But, if you really are short for time, here are some lessons you might start by trimming out: 

• Unit 1: Behavioral Econ - Replace the 7 lessons of Semester Course with the shorter 3 units of Money & Me
• Unit 2: Banking - Cut lesson 4 on being unbanked; Choose either lesson 7 or 8 on online banking
• Unit 3: Investing - Stop after lesson 7 to touch all the fundamentals but skip the strategies
• Unit 4: Types of Credit - Consider cutting Mortgages and/or Predatory Lending
• Unit 7: Insurance - Combine health insurance down to 1 lesson; eliminate lesson 6 on other insurances
• Unit 8: Taxes - Skip lesson 5, where students practice an entire Form 1040
• Unit 9: Budgeting - Cut lesson 6 on the gig economy
• Unit 10: Consumer Skills - Skip lessons 2 and 5

Of course, you're welcome to use our 9-Week Course instead, but Semester Course was 100% updated in Summer 2022, it includes all of our newest arcade games and MOVE activities, and it utilizes the answer key and lesson guide as one document, with less to keep track of. We consider Semester Course to be our flagship product for high school personal finance, and we hope you'll check it out and consider using it regardless of how much time you have. It's fully customizable!

About the Author

Jessica Endlich

When I started working at Next Gen Personal Finance, it's as though my undergraduate degree in finance, followed by ten years as an educator in an NYC public high school, suddenly all made sense.