Grade 7 EMS Term 2 Week 7: Financial Literacy – Budgets (Income & Expenditure)

Your Week Ahead

This week your Grade 7 EMS learners take their first proper look at budgets. The focus is on three building blocks: what a budget actually is, what counts as income, and what counts as expenditure. These concepts sound simple, but getting them right at this stage matters a great deal. A solid understanding here sets learners up for everything that follows in financial literacy, including planning, saving, and eventually analysing financial statements in the senior phase.

Learners coming into this week should already have some general awareness of money from their everyday lives and from earlier EMS work on economic concepts. Most of them will have heard words like “budget” at home, even if they have never formally defined it. That real-world familiarity is a great starting point. Your job this week is to take that informal knowledge and give it proper EMS language and structure.

With only two lessons this week, it is worth keeping things focused and concrete. Stick to clear definitions, use examples from contexts learners recognise (a household, a school tuck shop, a small business), and give them plenty of opportunity to categorise items as income or expenditure themselves. Hands-on practice with classifying and constructing a basic budget will do far more than notes alone.

This Week’s Lesson Plan

Day 1: Introduce the definition of a budget and the concept of income. Learners explore different sources of income using familiar examples, then practise identifying income items in given scenarios.

Day 2: Introduce expenditure and distinguish between different types of spending. Learners categorise a list of items as income or expenditure and begin constructing a simple personal or household budget, applying all three concepts together.

Download Your Lesson Plan

Download the full 2-day lesson plan as a Word document. Includes detailed activities, differentiation notes, and assessment guidance.

Download Lesson Plan (Word)