First Grade Finances

McKinley is in first grade and her class is starting their math unit on learning about money. Now, I know that McKinley is quite behind on the money concept. She’s never really had any and she doesn’t understand that everything costs money (like her food, her clothes, THE HOUSE, etc). Younger siblings always seem to learn things sooner because they have an older sibling to teach them (like the time our little 2-year old neighbor Emma offered to buy our toy kitchen from us because she liked it, and McKinley didn’t even know what “buy” meant). I figure that once an older sibling at the store starts asking, “can we buy this?” then the younger ones catch on quicker. But McKinley has been living her sheltered little oldest-child life (where I try to not take any of my children shopping with me anyway), so we’ve been trying to explain the general concepts to her. In fact, try explaining that paper money is actually better than coin money (she totally doesn’t believe us).

So the other day she had a worksheet to do that involved pennies, and Milt got out his big jar of pennies that he’s been stuffing pennies (and the occasional nickel or dime) into since college. He was curious if he had enough to go golfing with, and figured McKinley could use some of the pennies for her math homework. So as Milt is pouring out the coins on the table, McKinley watches in complete silence and awe and says, “YESSSSS....We’re RICH!!!!!” AND she’s serious, folks. She thinks it is like a chest of gold, and we can buy anything in the world with Milt’s nineteen dollars in change. Oh, goodness. Isn’t it too bad we can’t always be that innocent (and "rich")?