Check It Out! Products to Help Teach Money Management

While this issue focuses on parents financial planning, let’s not forget to teach money management skills to children, too. Helping them establish a healthy relationship with money is a great opportunity to give kids the basics they need to handle, earn, spend, save and share money. (Affiliate links included)

Here are a few areas to focus on:

• How to count currency and practice basic monetary transactions
• How to make and save money
• How to set priorities between spending, saving and sharing

Teach $

The Teaching Cash Register by Learning Resources introduces creative ways to help children practice currency denomination recognition, addition, subtraction and the value of money.  With added features of a built-in-scanner, scale and coin slot, kids learn by pretending they are either the shopper or the sales person.  This fun to operate cash register has lights, sounds and voice messages to simulate real life experiences. An added bonus of this cash register is it recognizes real coins as well as play money. This can help children who have trouble generalizing from play to real.

For more information on this product, go to www.ableplay.org.

Make $

The Little Green Money Machine is a primer for young entrepreneurs. This learning system includes a kid’s business book and business stand that inspires little minds to think of ways to take an idea and turn it into a business. The kit comes with a customized book, “Kids in Business Around the World,” that encourages kids’ creativity along with collaboration with their neighborhoods, schools and communities income earning efforts.

Save $

Moonjar Moneybox is a product invented by a company dedicated to helping children develop financial literacy.  This fold-able and colorful kit is easy for kids to assemble and takes piggy banks to a whole new level by teaching young ones to save some, spend some and share some of the money that comes their way.  This concept is a great way to introduce and support the merits of delayed gratification, goal setting, and giving to others, neighborhoods, schools and communities income earning efforts.

Do you have a product you would like to share with our readers? Please send us an email describing your product. We are happy to review and test your product. [email protected]. Please make sure to put Product Review in  email subject line.

Reviewed by Ellen Metrick, Director of Industry Relations & Partnerships, National Lekotek Center, [email protected]. For information on other toys and products for children with special needs, visit our website www.ableplay.org. AblePlay is a website sponsored by the National Lekotek Center, an authority on play and children with special needs. Follow us on Facebook.

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This post originally appeared on our January/February 2013 Magazine