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Source: The book was pitched by PR by the Book, and a free review copy was provided.
Book Description (my take):
Zulia goes on a school field trip to a local farm. Her teacher uses it to explain the financial concepts of production and consumption. The terms learned: producers, consumers, product, goods, services, capital resource, natural resource, human resource.
Review:
I'm all for teaching kids "big" concepts, so I was interested when I heard about this 20-volume series for teaching 5- to 9-year-olds the principles of finance.
However, I was disappointed with the book. The actual story text is only 6.5 pages long (about 650 words) with two additional worksheet pages to practice correctly identifying producers and consumers. The author stressed that the parents needed to come up with examples of their own to make sure the kids really understood the points. So I'm wondering why he didn't give more examples, or at least why he didn't combine 5 volumes of the Finance for Kidz series into one to make a standard-sized children's book worth the $20 price.
I'm a hobby farmer and studied commercial animal farming (animal science) in college. The author didn't accurately describe commercial farming. (He had chickens being hand-fed grain while wandering free in the farmyard with a mix of other farm animals. He also had one farm commercially raising cows, pigs, chickens, goats, and huge fields of some crop.) I don't think it's a good thing to misinform kids about one thing while teaching them another.
The text did a fairly good job at demonstrating the financial terms covered, though each term was only briefly covered and sometimes not clearly defined.
The illustrations were fairly accurate and pictured a commercial farm and the characters. Overall, I felt like the book left much of the work up to the parents, anyway, so the parents might as well come up with their own examples to begin with and save the money they'd spend on this book.
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