Twenty dollars for summer break
A relative gives you $20 at the start of summer break. Six weeks to go. There is a book you want for $8, and your friends will be going to the pool most weeks at $2 each time.
What is your plan?
Life Skills · Practice · Grades 3 to 5
Chapter 1: Money
Decide where it goes before it goes.
Decide where it goes before it goes.
These are pretend situations for practice. Real money decisions belong to your family.
A situation to decide. There is often more than one good answer: pick one and see what happens.
Twenty dollars for summer break
What is your plan?
A spending plan is a decision you make before the money is in your hand. That is the only difference between a plan and a guess.
If you have $20 and plan $10 to save, $8 to spend and $2 to give, that is $20. If your parts add to more than you have, it is a wish, not a plan.
Changing a plan on purpose is fine. What causes trouble is having no plan and finding out afterwards where the money went.
These ones do have right answers.
1 of 2
You have $15. Your plan is $10 to save and $8 to spend. Does the plan work?
2 of 2
You have $30 and plan to save half. How much is that?
Question 1 of 1
What makes something a plan rather than a guess?
Something to do away from the screen. Nobody is checking.
Why: Comparing the plan with what happened is where the learning is, not in the plan itself.
For a grown-up: Resist correcting the split. An unhelpful plan teaches faster than a good one imposed.
Save-spend-give is the standard three-jar model and its value is not the giving; it is that the child sees the whole amount divided before any of it moves. The division is the lesson.
Watch for a plan whose parts exceed the total. Children rarely check the sum because the plan feels like a wish list, and the fix is to add it up out loud rather than to say the plan is wrong.
Let a bad plan run once. A child who spends everything in week one and has nothing in week two has learned something no explanation delivers.