First, provide a child with a pack of index cards, a rubberband, and a pen or pencil. On each card, suggest children write down the names of companies that make the items they use, such as toys, playground equipment, snacks. They also can make cards for the retail shops and grocery stores they visit and for companies that provide services: banks, dry cleaners, fast food restaurants, Netflix, and those that provide repairs.
According to Peter Lynch's book, BEATING THE STREET, identifying firms you know is one way to decide where to invest, where to hold stock in a company, i.e. where to become a company owner.
At home or in a classroom, once children get in the habit of checking the names of companies they and their households use, they can add more information to each card. They might add the locations of company headquarters they find noted on boxes or that they find by checking internet contact information to see if companies are domestic or foreign. They can add the names of products, especially new products, these companies produce, as well as prices and, maybe, the number of ounces in each product.They might start counting cars in parking lots to note which stores are doing better than others.
In Britain, Imperial College transferred seed money from the school's endowment to a student investment fund. Young people can begin "investing" by becoming their household's and classroom's financial advisers by monitoring stock prices on CNBC or the internet and recording stock prices over time. If prices rise, they can figure how much the initial value of an investment would have increased. And stock might be listed as the gift they want for their next birthday or other special occasion.
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