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LifeSmarts Educational Strategies and Applications

LifeSmarts Educational Strategies and Applications

LifeSmarts, the nation’s premier consumer program, provides real-world education for middle school and high school students.

This free educational program equips young people with the knowledge they need to help them succeed in adult life. While students learn about core consumer topics, they develop critical thinking skills in an interdisciplinary format.

To help educators easily adopt the program, LifeSmarts aligns with the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) Language Arts Standards. It provides educators with a manageable set of consumer concepts, keywords, and content vocabulary activities to enliven instruction in family and consumer sciences, business, technology classes, and more.

Classroom teachers, LifeSmarts coaches, and community educators will find that LifeSmarts also aligns with 21st Century Skills and provides meaningful activities, lessons, and competitions within the classroom and beyond.

Goals for students

  1. Learning new concepts to take with them into their “real” life.
  2. Creating a framework or scaffold to use to “store” the new input for future retrieval.
  3. Engaging in active learning.
  4. Responding to critical thinking questions in lessons and in competition.
  5. Moving along the continuum of higher order thinking from “knowledge” to the “evaluation” of consumer and financial information in the marketplace.

We support educators

  1. Providing free educational resources at LifeSmarts.org.
  2. Aligning our materials with Common Core and 21st Century Skills so that teachers across the country can easily see how our materials fit into a standards-based program.
  3. Producing current educational materials that integrate with and supplement high school curricula.
  4. Hosting no-cost online team competitions and contests, as well as in-person state and national competitions.

LifeSmarts Educational Documents