Questions teachers ask about Cityfort for Teachers

Cityfort's free unit "How real companies make money" has four 50-minute lessons and an optional capstone for grades 9–12. Students use real numbers from companies' SEC filings. Every lesson includes slides, a worksheet, an answer key and a teacher guide.

Every lesson and file is free, and students never create accounts or log in. The optional teacher email is never needed to download anything.

The lessons are written for high school, grades 9–12. Homeschool families and intro college instructors can use the same files. We haven't adapted the unit for middle school.

Cityfort's lessons explain what the business behind a stock does and how it reports results. No lesson asks students to pick, rank or value a stock, and nothing on Cityfort is a recommendation.

The numbers come from companies' SEC filings. Most come from a Form 10-K, the annual report a company files with the SEC. One count in Lesson 3 comes from a Form 10-Q, its quarterly report, and the capstone's Starbucks card comes from its fiscal 2026 earnings release (Form 8-K). Every lesson shows the period and the filing next to its numbers. The answer key shows where to find each one.

Each edition keeps its numbers fixed. Data checked Nov 7, 2026.

Lessons 1–4 each take one 50-minute class period. Each one splits into two shorter blocks for 45-minute periods. The optional capstone takes 2–3 periods plus homework.

Each lesson has a teacher page, a student page, a teacher guide, a worksheet, an answer key and slides. The worksheet ends with a short exit ticket. The guides, worksheets and answer keys are PDFs, and the slides are PowerPoint files.

Lesson 2, "Revenue, profit and cash are not the same thing," has a worksheet with real Netflix and Chipotle figures. Students compare profit and cash in three cases and explain why they differ.

Lesson 4, the 10-K scavenger hunt, has teams find ten facts in Nike's real 10-K. Students cite the Item and page for each answer, in one 50-minute period. A printed excerpt pack covers rooms where the SEC website is blocked.

You don't need a finance background to teach the unit. Each teacher guide includes a 2-minute background box and links to plain-English Cityfort Learn guides.

Every lesson works in Google Classroom, Canvas and Schoology as plain links and PDF or PowerPoint files. Each lesson page also has a "Copy link" button and a "Share to Google Classroom" link.

Students open the student page from your post, a QR code or a short web address.

The slides are PowerPoint files, and they open in Google Slides. Upload the file to Google Drive, then open it with Google Slides.

Every teacher guide has ideas for English learners, students with IEPs and advanced students. They include a word bank, sentence frames and partly filled tables. For large print, enlarge any worksheet when printing (tabloid paper works well), or zoom in on screen.

If your class runs a stock-market simulation, these lessons can come before it: they explain what a company does and how it reports results. They do not suggest which companies to choose, and Cityfort does not run, rank or judge simulation picks.

The lessons support selected National Standards for Personal Financial Education (2021) and, for Common Core states, literacy and math standards. The standards page lists each code, the lesson and how fully it fits. We say "supports", never "aligned", and make no state-standards claims yet.

Cityfort collects no personal information about students. Student pages have no logins, forms, ads or tracking cookies.

An anonymous page counter with no cookies counts visits. It stores no IP address. Its visitor code changes daily, and once that day's value is deleted, the code can't be linked to a person or another day's visits. It records things like the page, the referring site, the device type and the approximate country and region. It doesn't run when a browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.

Our host, Cloudflare, receives IP addresses to deliver pages, as any web host does. Optional links to company pages lead to the main site. Ads and Google Analytics can load there, but only after a visitor accepts cookies. Privacy policy

These teacher pages and the student pages have no ads. Lesson files, worksheets and slides never carry ads.

Lessons link to company pages only as optional further reading, and no lesson step needs them. Those pages are part of the main site, which can show ads and a cookie choice.

Cityfort's lessons are under CC BY-NC 4.0, so you may copy and adapt them for noncommercial use. Credit Cityfort, link to the license and say if you made changes.

We'd also be glad if you link to the lesson page. If you change a lesson, please mark it as modified; changed versions aren't reviewed by Cityfort.

The share kit has short descriptions, a suggested citation, links and logo files for resource lists. Please link to the lesson pages, so readers always get the newest edition.

Cityfort for Teachers is made by Hardik Bhandare, who has worked as an equity research analyst. His method: "I decide what to cover and approve every page; every number is checked against the filing it came from."

About the author

Use the contact page. We reply within two US school days. We fix the lesson, raise its version number and note the change in its "What changed" box.

The lessons are in English.

We aim to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA on these web pages and in the PDF files. Receipts and data tables are real tables, PDFs are tagged, and every slide has a title, with alt text for visuals.

Need another format? Ask through the contact page, and we'll send one. Accessibility details