Another mini money lesson

One of Emily's latest "projects" has been making letters to send to people.  She'll do a little drawing, maybe cut it out and put it in an extra return envelope leftover from my bookwork bills.  Then she'll write an "address" and want to send it to someone.  I tell her it will need a stamp, so she will draw, cut out and glue on her own stamp.  Then she wants to mail it by hanging it on the mailbox for the mailman.  One afternoon she made six letters, so I decided it was time for another mini money lesson.

I tried to explain that real stamps cost money.  Emily's initial solution was to write a check from the bank, which she quickly designed and cut out herself.  Then I had to explain that stamps cost real money, so she found a purse with some change leftover from her pillow pet purchase.  We had a quick lesson in coin values, which will definitely have to be repeated.  We determined that she had $.64.  Then we counted out $.44 and she bought a stamp from me.  I wrote out a real envelope with a real address and she put her letter inside.  Then we hung it outside for the mailman where she kept close tabs on it until it was gone.

Of course, she wanted to send more envelopes, but she didn't have enough money to buy any more stamps.  This was mostly due to the fact that the day before she "bought" one of her bookorder books from me.  As you may recall, she didn't have enough money at the time the bookorders were due to pick out a book.  However, I had ordered a cute (pink!) princess book called The Very Fairy Princess that I thought would be fun for her to have (it is a good book).  She was so excited when she saw it she wanted to "buy" it from me because she had saved enough money by then.  I decided it might be more effective to have a visual stimulus like an actual book to purchase rather than placing an online order and waiting, so I let her buy it and might do something similar in the future.  However, that book purchase pretty much wiped out her small stash of dollar bills.  Plus, one of the next times we go to Wal-mart she has to buy a new tube of toothpaste for herself because she squeezed almost everything out of her old one into the sink earlier this week after watching a movie that another little friend brought over.  Apparently she is very impressionable.


Anyway, as Emily continues to grasp the concept and power of money, I'm sure the list of things she wants to buy will grow by leaps and bounds.  This will create many more future lessons in money.  In the meantime, maybe I should come up with some ways she can earn a little money at home.  I'd love to hear any good ideas!  And if you get a letter from Emily, you know that it is very special, because she likely had to pay for it herself. ;o)