For pennies a day...

Tonight, my son and I were reading his weekly story. The first thing I noticed as we opened the reader to the correct page was the genre: "Nonfiction text explains something about real life."

Cool, I thought.

The title of the selection, "If You Made a Million."

Already I am skeptical of the "realness" of this story.

On the first page, the kid feeds the fish and earns a penny. It says it will buy anything that costs one cent.

See where I would label this fiction?

The story goes on..the kids do certain activities, apparently at a fair, and earn money. Isn't this child labor and illegal? As each amount of money increases, the wizard (more realism) explains how the same value compares to dimes, nickels and so on.

Then the story says that if you were to purchase a Ferris wheel for $10, 000, using only pennies someone might not be too happy about it. That made me think of the Office Max commericals.



And just for the record, I went to Office Max. I found nothing for a penny. I was disappointed. I did however purchase a new office chair. Something told me that had I slapped a bag o' pennies on the counter, some words would have been exchanged.

But, back to the Ferris wheel, the story states, "probably a check would be best."

Um. Take a look:


Thanks to Visa, and the convenience of the check card, [I know I am guilty] kids don't know about checks and cash--much. I can't even get the correct change back at Sonic, and heaven forbid if I give her the two pennies on a 2.17 Rt44....

The next section talks about buying a castle. But, if you don't have enough money, you can borrow from the bank. This section totally cracked me up. When it states that you'd pay more money back because of interest, I was guessing this was how they got the nonfiction genre to fly. At least they didn't make it a horror story of Steven King proportions of mentioning the AMOUNT of interest along with the LENGTH of time of time the loan would be paid.

The icing on the cake was the section on making a million dollars. Which, by the way, the kid made by babysitting the "obstreperous ogre baby." The book explains, "if you keep you million, you can probably live on the interest without doing anymore work for the rest of your life."

Great.

I am so happy they are teaching these great values in the third grade. And I had to look up obstreperous for the definition and pronunciation.