Financial Fitness for Life® (FFFL) provides high-quality instructional materials for use with students from kindergarten to grade 12. These materials are presented in separate publications for four grade levels (K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12); within the grade levels, lessons are clustered in themes. The overarching goal of the materials is to help students make thoughtful, well-informed decisions about important aspects of personal finance, including earning income, spending, saving, borrowing, investing, and managing money.

The teacher and student guides are intended to work in tandem; the teacher guides contain the pedagogy and lesson descriptions while the student guides contain the corresponding exercises to be used in and out of the classroom.

All lessons are based on real-world concepts, and are presented in a manner that reinforces learning through practice. Features common to all grade levels include the following:

• FFFL materials are based on national standards. A matrix at each of the four grade levels shows how lesson content correlates to standards in economics, personal finance, mathematics (K-8), and language arts (K-5).
• FFFL materials engage students in the economic way of thinking. Concepts from economics provide the organizing framework and logic by which students learn how to make good decisions, and, equally important, how to avoid poor ones. The emphasis on economics concepts and the economic way of thinking distinguishes these materials from others used to develop personal financial literacy.
• FFFL materials call for active learning. Lesson procedures describe engaging, hands-on instructional activity designed to reinforce students' understanding through applications and practice.
• FFFL materials address concepts in a developmentally appropriate manner. Lessons for younger students frequently emphasize narrative, drama, and physical representations of economics and personal finance concepts. Lessons for older students illustrate certain uses of more abstract representations. The developmental approach to learning has been a hallmark of Council for Economic Education materials for several decades.
• FFFL materials emphasize a variety of teaching methods compatible with different learning styles. Role playing, group discussions, gathering information from the Internet, reading materials, interviewing individuals, drawing pictures, and analyzing case problems are some of the many teaching methods found in the materials. Additional resources are available online at http://fffl.councilforeconed.org
• FFFL materials are reinforced by assessments. Assessments are provided at the end of each theme.
• FFFL materials invite parents to play a role. Parents can play an important role in developing their children's personal financial literacy. FFFL lessons for each level are accompanied by a parent guide. These guides provide background information and activities, linked to the lessons, which parents may use to reinforce and extend their children's understanding of topics in personal finance.