Economic lessons are everywhere, even in your favorite kids’ lit
The best lessons are the valuable ones that are so much fun you don’t even know you’re learning. Take teaching money and finance to your kids, for example. Seriously! If your child’s a reader, then you’ll be happy to hear that most children’s literature has an economic or money lesson buried in there somewhere.
“There is economics in everything,” said Curt Anderson, the director of the Center for Economic Education at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. Prove it, I said. “Walter the Farting Dog is about externalities and benefits and costs,” he explained to me with an elfin grin. I caught Anderson between lessons at a Minnesota Council on Economic Education conference where teachers were learning how to use children’s literature to teach economics and personal finance to kids of all ages. In five years, the state council has put roughly 158 teachers through this extensive training, and there’s a waiting list.
Why use books to teach money concepts? Kids love stories. And stories take abstract concepts and make them relevant in a way that sitting down with a textbook doesn’t.
But you don’t need to be an educator or an economist to take favorite kids books and read them through a different lens. Take some of my children’s favorite stories. In the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, by Laura Joffe Numeroff, the mouse’s desires that don’t stop with one cookie paint a picture of how a want can trigger other wants and the messy consequences that follow. In The Mitten, by Jan Brett, animals try to cozy, one by one, into a white mitten found in the snow. But as more animals enter the mitten, there’s limited space, illustrating the concept of scarcity.
The web site KidsEconBooks has suggestions for conversation-starting questions. After reading Click, Clack, Moo: Cows that Type, by Doreen Cronin, ask your child if the eggs the hens threatened to withhold if they don’t get electric blankets represent an economic want and if eggs are a good or a service? You might also ask how people get things they want in real life, taking into account that threatening notes pounded out by cows wielding a typewriter don’t get you terribly far.
If you want to get serious, the 160-page manual used by teachers to explain basic financial concepts through stories is online. Search for “Teaching Economics Using Children’s Literature” at the web site for the Education Resources Information Center.
But why not head for the bookshelf without a road map? Put on that economics hat before you crack open your favorite tales and you can put Anderson’s theory — that there is economics in everything if you only think to look for it — to the test.
Kara McGuire is a personal finance columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Resources
KidsEconBooks
Education Resources Information Center
EconKids
St. Louis Federal Reserve (To download lesson plans, click on “Education Resources” then “Lesson Plans”)
