Five Seeds or Ten Dinners
Draw both futures: the one where you eat all ten seeds, and the one where you plant five. Then draw the one where it does not rain.
- Ages
- 5 to 10
- Time
- 20 minutes
- You Need
- Paper, crayons, ten small objects to stand in for seeds.
What to do
- Put ten small things on the table. These are your seeds and you are hungry.
- Draw what tonight looks like if you eat all ten.
- Draw what a few months from now looks like if you eat five and plant five.
- Now draw the third picture: five seeds planted, and it did not rain. This one is not optional.
Ask afterward
- Which picture did you want to draw most?
- Which one did you not want to draw?
- Is saving the same as planting? What is different?
- If somebody promised the plants would definitely grow, should you believe them?
For the grown-up
Children reliably want to skip the third picture, and it is the whole reason the activity exists. Risk belongs inside the definition of investing rather than as a footnote, and drawing the bad outcome once makes it real in a way that saying it does not.
Read this first
What Is Investing?
The activity works on its own, and it works considerably better after the explanation it belongs with.
Read the explanation