“The Investor” is a fun, real life project that teaches kids about investing their money and the basics of the stock market. Instructions and practice on how to keep track of changing prices and how to calculate profits or losses are included. Students follow the changing prices of their shares over 10 days attempting to end up with the highest profit possible.

Through the project, students will need to:

- Round decimals to the nearest whole dollar.

- Multiply to find the value of their shares.

- Subtract to determine profits or losses.

- Graph their final results .

- Create inferences and advice based on their results.

Using a project based learning approach, students will find their own data and use that information to determine if their shares are making or losing money. Several adaptation options are included in the instructions & tips pages to make the assignment easier or more challenging, as well as faster or slower.

In order to complete this assignment individually, students will need to have internet access to check on the share prices of the companies they choose. If this is not available, the entire project can be completed as a class choosing the same companies to purchase shares in. This would create the same final result for all students, but the teacher will be in control of finding the information which will save some time, but won’t give students the experience of looking for it themselves.

For each skill there is an instruction page with questions to work on as a class as well as several practice questions for students to do on their own and can be checked either as a class or for marks.

Answer keys for all practice pages and a final marking rubric are included.