Childrens Text Set for Financial Literacy

The Young Investor:

Save, Spend, or Donate?

I’m Broke: The money Handbook:

For my text groupset, I chose three books, “The Young Investor,” Save, Spend, or Donate?” And “I’m Broke: The money Handbook.” The other text I chose came from the web one was a comic book provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston entitled “Wishes and Rainbows” and a video from YouTube of an interview conducted by Oprah Winfrey called “What the Rich teach their children about money - Robert Kiyosaki” the author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad”. The focus of this text set is to give students a literary introduction to money and finance. Money is something that is rarely focused on in school and with the text set that I have chosen this would be an excellent opportunity to give students in the fifth grade their first introduction to understanding the value of money. The reason why I wanted to use this text because I feel the subject of money needs to be introduced and learned by all children before they become adults. I decided on the subject of money since the entire world uses it, and commerce is about as multicultural as it gets. We are currently in a global economy so there’s no reason why any child from any race creed or ethnic background could gain some incredible life lessons from this text set.

A mini-lesson I would do is students after reading the three hardcopy books is to start a discussion on money. We would discuss income tax and how things are funded in the school and around the city for infrastructure. I would also touch on topics of banking and how compound interest works. For example, we will show students how $2000 in a savings account getting 5% interest at the age of seven would give them $1 million for retirement by the age of 60. Another lesson would be centered around conservation using the comic book “Wishes and Rainbows” provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston website. In this lesson about conservation, students learn about how the allocation of resources comes into question by the forces of supply and demand which drive prices up or down, and the economy is driven by consumer spending which causes these fluctuations. In the section of the lesson, we will read the comic book and then discuss a glossary of vocabulary words associated with the story such as production, investment, rationing, scarcity, etc. Next, we will have a series of discussion questions but will have the students write detailed sentences to answer the questions using the vocabulary words from the glossary.

The final item in my text set is a video of an interview from the Oprah Winfrey show of a gentleman by the name of Robert Kiyosaki who is the author of the book “Rich Dad Poor Dad.” In this 15 minute interview, Robert talks about his life growing up with his father who was a professor, and his best friend’s father who he referred to as “Rich Dad” who happened to be a successful entrepreneur and businessman. Robert talks about his deep conversations with his “Rich Dad” and how his father's vocabulary showed a sense of entitlement while his “Rich Dad” used vocabulary that only businessmen and entrepreneurs used. This relationship between Robert and his rich dad helped him formulate the entrepreneurial spirit that has made him a millionaire today. This would be a great motivational video to spark the interest in students to give them the entrepreneur spirit to help foster the business mindset within them.

What the Rich teach their children about money - Robert Kiyosaki: