Economics from a Young Age

Ya'll know we love the game-schooling.

But I'm going to be very honest with all ya'll--sometimes I get frazzled at the very thought of teaching my kids new games, especially more complicated games. I like sticking close to our faithful few, where we've learned how to be gracious winners and losers, and I don't have 5,983,659,385,793.85 questions shot at me constantly.

We were getting close to introducing money in our math scope and sequence, and I knew a super-easy way to get them in the mindset of buying-and-selling would be Monopoly, but I just...didn't want to mess with it. (Normally we'd just go shop and I'd let them pay...but that's kind of not going to happen these days. Especially seeing as how one of my kids still LICKS random things. WHY.)

I mentioned this mental road-block to my husband, who immediately jumped at the opportunity to teach one of his favorite games ("Capitalism-in-a-box!") to the kids. Yay!

Unsurprisingly, after the initial learning curve, they LOVED it. Although I initially did well (I got Boardwalk and Park Place on my very first time around the board!) I had a string of bad luck and it wasn't long before they gleefully drove me into bankruptcy. (The title of my autobiography will be, "Humility and How I Achieved It.") 

Something I loved about this experience was that it was so much more than the simple math of buying and selling. They also got to practice obvious things, like counting with dice rolling and identifying doubles, of course, and I was shocked at how quickly they got the hang of calculating percentages and even estimating (is $200 for income tax more or less than 20% of what you currently possess?). That is normally its own section of an elementary math scope and sequence, but the concepts were there and simple to understand. It was a painless, natural way to introduce these concepts WITHOUT worksheets, lessons, or basically any effort on MY part (except the mortification of being brutally beaten by my offspring in a board game).