Saturday, July 30, 2011
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Neighbors | Sarah Foor .After a trip around the Smart Money game board, the little travelers showed off some of the gifts from their trips, including their passports, foreign currencies, and big smiles.
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Neighbors | Sarah Foor .Intrepid traveler Jocelyn Zhao couldn't help but look ahead at the next destination on her imaginary trip around the world. Zhao was in charge of moving the Smart Money gamepiece from Botswana to Romania.
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Neighbors | Sarah Foor .Each time the travelers passed over a country's border in the Smart Money game, they had to pause and add a new stamp to their passports. Acacia Anderson (left) helped her sister Kaila Anderson (right) as she added a stamp for their imaginary visit to China.
By SARAH FOOR
When the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County began its “One World, Many Stories” summer reading program in June, the young readers created passports and were given a stamp for each place they traveled through reading. On June 30, the kids at the Austintown Library received fresh stamps for Botswana, Romania, China, and Guatemala as they took a trip around the world with the library’s Smart Money program.
Children’s librarian Judy Sluss created an extensive Monopoly-like travel game that explored four foreign countries and their currency.
“Today’s game is a fun way to teach kids that there are different kinds of money in the world. It also teaches them what money buys, like the goods and services that the kids can invest in throughout the game,” Sluss explained.
In 2008, the library became a national grant recipient to share the Smart Money program with all ages. For adults, the program shares information about investing, saving for college or retirement, or preparing for a major purchase.
For kids, the program teaches basic monetary concepts, including what money is, how it is earned, and what can be done with it.
For her June 30 game, Sluss divided the group of young money mavens into teams and gave them each $15. The teams traveled and explored each country, stopping at each “border” to trade Botswana’s pula currency into Romanian Leu, Chinese yuan and Guatemalan quetzal. The kids were allowed to borrow from the Smart Money bank if they ran out of funds, but the group planned well and avoided getting into debt.
Sluss found that the event was a beneficial to teach the kids about money, but also to teach them about different places in the world.
“I hope that someday you get to travel to the places we talked about today, and all the around the world if you’d like,” Sluss told her guests.