In essence, Questions and Answers about Money from Usborne books is a fiscally responsible advent calendar, except that it’s useful all year round. There’s perhaps a disappointing lack of chocolate, but if your children use its lessons wisely, they should be able afford their own before too long! When is the right time to talk to your kids about money? Arguably, you can’t start too early.
Usborne books have a whole series of excellent “Lift the Flap” books for Children aged around 5 upwards. They cover a range of topics from picture atlases to mathematics via art, ecology, and what lies beneath our cities. If that wasn’t enough, there’s even one about the Periodic Table. Now the series is expanding further with the release of the excellent and informative Questions and Answers about Money.
What is Questions and Answers about Money?
In 13 pages this book aims to introduce lots of the important concepts around money. Why do we use it, what forms it can take, and what constitutes a good and bad deal? Just some of the topics covered in the book.
Each page has bold bright illustrations and lots of the lovely tactile openable doors that make up “lift the flap” books. Each door has an associated question, either written on the flap or just above it. Under the flap is the answer. For example, under the “What can we do with money?” flap, we find the answer, “You can spend it…save it, so you have money to spend in the future, earn it by doing something you get paid for, borrow it or lend it.”
This is not presented as a wall of text, however. The flap is interspersed with more drawings. The answers use not only the piece of window behind the flap, they also use the back of the flap too. The book has a lot of surface area with which to convey its answers!
Through its questions and answers, we look at the history of money, ways to earn money, and ways to manage it if you have some. It looks at the cultural implications of economics, the problems of inflation, and what to do if you find money in the street. It covers some abstract concepts, such as insurance, fair pay, and whether money makes you happy. There’s also a question devoted to in-app purchases – possibly the most important lesson in modern parenting!
Why Read Questions and Answers about Money?
Usborne lift-the-flap books are always a great hit with kids. They provide a tactile reading experience that invites their readers to explore the given topic. Teaching children about money and commerce in the 21st century is extremely important.
If you want to start your children learning about money from an early age, this is a great way to open the conversation and engage them to explore the confusing world of commerce on their own. (Before they max out your credit card on Marvel Snap! gold.)
If you’d like to pick up a copy of Questions and Answers about Money you can do so here, in the UK. I can’t currently find a link for availability in the US, but many of the other books in this series are, so I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
It’s also worth noting that Usborne has two more guides to teach the fundamentals of money management. Managing Your Money, which I bought for my young teenagers and is an excellent guide as they start to have to look after their own money and budget a little more. Money for Beginners I haven’t seen, but we do have the excellent Politics for Beginners, which I can whole-heartedly recommend. Even I learned a lot from it!
If you enjoyed this review, you can check out my other book reviews, here.
Disclosure: I was sent a copy of this book in order to write this review.
