What We Do

Captain Cash is an interactive education program designed to teach basic financial management skills to your students. This dynamic curriculum was designed to address the following issues:

• Money behaviors observed and learned in childhood impact adult behaviors.
• Money management messages that children process in the home, the community, on television, and via other media shape their values, attitudes and future money habits.
• Individuals and families are not able to respond to economic disruptions because they have not learned critical money management concepts and skills.

To address these issues, Captain Cash includes four classroom enrichment sessions of approximately 45 minutes each that focus on earning, saving, spending, and borrowing money. Each session introduces vocabulary words and one or more basic economic concepts. Each session also includes a game or activity and a take-home handout. All lessons meet Indiana Academic Standards for math and social studies.

Along with learning basic financial concepts, students learn and practice important life skills to foster self-sufficiency such as communication, decision-making, problem-solving, managing resources, planning, and organizing.

If you think the Captain Cash program would be a valuable addition to your elementary school curriculum and if you live inside the state of Indiana, you can have the program delivered for free.

If you live outside the state of Indiana, please click here to learn more about how you can purchase this impactful program for your state.

Purdue Extension wants to help you increase your physical activity. No need to worry about finding time to attend a program—this one is done completely via email!

Walking is an easy way to start and maintain a physically active lifestyle. Walking is accessible to almost anyone, does not require specific skills or abilities to perform, and can be done alone or with others. Physical inactivity is directly related to the prevalence of adult and childhood obesity. Participation in regular physical activity, like walking, decreases the risk of coronary heart disease, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, depression, obesity, breast and colon cancers, and falls in older adults.

Get WalkIN’ helps to promote and increase physical activity among adults simply by walking more. This unique program is entirely e-mail-based. Over a period of 12 weeks, you will receive 16 e-mail messages from Purdue Extension containing credible and useful information about the health benefits of walking, how to overcome barriers, principles of self-efficacy, social support, goal setting, walking locations, and relapse prevention.

Let us help motivate and encourage you to get on your feet! This program helps participants make simple changes to their daily routine to get in more steps—and on their way to better overall health and well-being.

A Matter of Balance (MOB) is specifically designed to reduce the fear of falling and improve activity levels among community-dwelling older adults. The program enables participants to reduce the fear of falling by learning to view falls as controllable, setting goals for increasing activity levels, making small changes to reduce fall risks at home, and exercise to increase strength and balance.

The curriculum includes group discussions, mutual problem solving, role-play activities, exercise training, assertiveness training, and a few homework assignments.

Participants learn about the importance of exercise in preventing falls and practice exercises to improve strength, coordination, and balance.

Steps to a Healthy You is a five-session series focused on eating a healthy Mediterranean-style eating pattern (a.k.a. eating the Med Way). Sessions focus on the 7 Simple Steps to Eating the Med Way. Each session explores 1-2 simple steps, a mindfulness skill, and features Med Way recipes. Food demonstration and/or cooking instruction is included in each session.