At the store
You have enough money for one thing. You see stickers you like. You also see a snack you want.
What do you do?
Life Skills · Discover · Pre-K to Grade 2
Chapter 1: Money
You swap it for things you need.
You swap it for things you need.
These are pretend situations for practice. Real money decisions belong to your family.
2 situations to decide. There is often more than one good answer: pick one and see what happens.
At the store
What do you do?
At the market
What do you do?
Money is for swapping. You give money. You get a thing.
When the money is gone, it is gone. You cannot swap again until you have more.
A sticker costs a little. A bicycle costs a lot. The price tells you how much to swap.
Question 1 of 1
You spent all your money on a toy. Can you buy a snack too?
Something to do away from the screen. Nobody is checking.
Why: Doing the swap once teaches more than watching it twenty times.
For a grown-up: Cash, not a card. The point is that the money visibly leaves their hand.
Children often think money is unlimited because they rarely see it run out — a card works every time, and the balance behind it is invisible. Saying "we are not buying that today" teaches less than "we have spent what we brought".
Watch for the belief that a bigger coin is worth more than a smaller one. It is nearly universal at this age and is not a counting error; it is a sensible guess about size that happens to be wrong.
The useful thing to do together is let them hand the money over and take the change. Watching a parent pay teaches almost nothing; doing the swap once teaches most of this lesson.