Looking for good federal income tax lessons for high school students? I’ve got what you need to teach students about W2s, tax tables, Form 1040, and more.
If you’ve read many posts on this blog, you know my mission rid all math classrooms of the dreaded ‘When will I ever have to learn this?’. When I taught high school, that question was usually echoed by someone in the back of the room saying ‘Yeah, why can’t you teach us how to do taxes, or something useful?’.
Well… be careful what you ask for, kids.
I’ve been working on a good way to teach this skill to kids for a while. It’s a complicated topic, and honestly, a lot of adults are intimidated by it, too. Obviously, most kids are going to have pretty simple tax returns when they start out with their first job, so I wanted to start by giving kids practical experience filling out tax forms by hand using simple scenarios.
Why teach them to fill out forms by hand?
Yes, there are increasingly more options available each year for filing your taxes online for free. I don’t necessarily think there’s anything wrong with using these as adults. But here’s the problem with just telling kids, ‘You don’t need to learn that – you can file online for free.’ Computers can make mistakes. If they don’t have the basic knowledge of how taxes are being calculated, they’ll be unable to spot and fix errors.
Hiring an accountant is another option, but again, students should be able to look at their prepared return and make sure it looks accurate.
Practicing filling out forms by hand gives students an understanding of how their taxes are calculated, so the process does not seem as intimidating when they are adults.
The basic topics students need to know
I’ve found that teaching students everything they need to know to file a basic return (filling out the forms by hand, of course) takes about a week. This is assuming you have the standard 50-60 minute class periods.
Here’s what they need to know:
- What is a W2, and what information does it provide?
- What’s the difference between a standard deduction and an itemized deduction, and how do you know which one you should use?
- How do you read a tax table?
- How do you fill out the Form 1040?
If you don’t have a week, I recommend just focusing on the W-2. You can do this in a day or two, and it will still provide good information for students. You can find my resources for just focusing on the W-2 here.
My Resources
If you’re ready to teach these skills in your classroom, here are the resources that I hope will help you teach these very important skills in your classroom.
As I mentioned above, this should take about a week of 50-60 minute class periods. All lessons use real IRS tax forms and I update each resource in January when the new tax forms become available. You’ll be able to re-download the unit each year to get the updates at no cost to you.
Students will gain experience filling out the tax forms using realistic W-2s.
If you’re feeling intimidated by teaching this, please don’t be! I have everything laid out with explanations and Google Slides to help you teach this topic.
Looking for more resources?
I have a FREE reference sheet for students to use when throughout this unit available in my Freebie Library. If you don’t already have the link, please enter your email address below, and I’ll send you the link!
