Cinders McLeod

With five younger siblings at home, Honey wants a place of her own to have some peace and quiet. She decides to purchase a playhouse by carefully managing the money she earns, setting aside savings every week.

This is a great book for introducing basic economic concepts to even very young children. The math here is simple enough and the story straightforward enough that even young elementary school-age children can follow along. (Potentially even preschoolers might get the gist of it, depending on the individual child.) The story, with its bouncy siblings and a happy ending, make the book accessible and fun; it does not sound like a textbook at all.

The illustrations are pretty basic (lacking elaborate backgrounds, for example) but they are a good fit for this book. Honey is a female rabbit, which is nice because so many children's books have male protagonists, even when the characters are animals. We only ever see Honey's siblings and father, so this could potentially be a single parent situation (or at a minimum, can be interpreted as such), which is also nice to see as many children live with a single parent but don't necessarily see that reflected in the picture books they read.… (more)