Your 5-year-old just learned to read. Suddenly, signs everywhere are jumping out at them. STOP. EXIT. NO SMOKING. They are reading aloud, all the time, with the focused intensity of a tiny narrator who has just discovered they have a job.
Here's the thing that surprised me about my own kid at this age: they can also, with very little additional effort, read prices. Not because price-reading is hard. But because most parents don't think to point at price tags and ask their kid to read them.
That's a missed opportunity. Reading prices isn't just a literacy skill — it's the entry point to a whole set of money skills your kid will use for the next sixty years.
Why "reading prices" is a skill
We don't usually think of it this way, but reading a price tag involves a small bundle of separate competencies, each one worth its own attention.
There's the decoding — actually reading the numbers. Easy once a kid can read, harder than you'd think for kids in transition.
There's understanding the decimal. Three dollars and ninety-nine cents is one thing; three ninety-nine is the verbal shortcut grown-ups use. Both refer to the same number, but kids need to be told.
There's understanding what the dollar sign means. (My nephew once asked me what the $ symbol "was the letter for." He thought it was a fancy S. Fair guess.)
There's understanding what the price represents — that this small piece of paper is what you have to pay to take this thing home with you.
And there's comparing prices, which is the skill that opens the door to all of basic personal finance.
All of these can be taught. None of them require a workbook. They require pointing at price tags.
The 90-second drill
Here's the actual practice. Every grocery trip. Takes 90 seconds, tops.
Pick up an item your kid might want — a cereal box, a yogurt, whatever. Hold it out where they can see it. Point at the price tag.
"What does that say?"
That's it. That's the drill.
For a 5-year-old, you might get "three. nine. nine." Close enough. Help them: "Three dollars and ninety-nine cents. Or three-ninety-nine. That's how grown-ups say it."
Do it again with another item. "What does that one say?"
Once they can decode confidently, escalate:
"Which one is more expensive?"
For a 6-year-old, this requires them to compare two numbers with decimal points, which is genuinely hard. Help them when they need help. "Three-ninety-nine and five-forty-nine. The five is bigger than the three, so this one is more expensive."
After a few weeks, escalate again:
"How much more does this one cost than that one?"
Now you're doing subtraction with decimals. Your six-year-old is doing actual math, in a grocery store, willingly. Bluey could never.
What it actually teaches
The 90-second drill is doing more than it looks like.
It's teaching place value — the difference between $3 and $30 — which is one of the foundational math skills schools struggle with for years.
It's teaching decimal points — what $3.99 means versus $39.90 — at exactly the age when school is just starting to introduce decimals abstractly.
It's teaching comparison, which is the foundation of all economic decision-making.
It's teaching price literacy. Your kid will, by age 8, walk into a grocery store and instinctively see the prices. Most adults don't. Most adults will pick up any item that looks vaguely like what they want, glance at the shelf, put it in the cart. Your kid, trained for two years on the 90-second drill, will pick up two items and compare.
That habit is worth, conservatively, several hundred dollars a year for the rest of their lives. From a 90-second weekly drill.
What it does NOT need to be
A few things this drill doesn't require, despite how parenting books make these things sound.
It doesn't need to be a lesson. If you announce, "Okay honey, we're going to practice reading prices today," you've already lost them. Just do it casually, in the moment, while you're shopping anyway.
It doesn't need to be consistent. Skip a week. Skip two weeks. The cumulative effect over months matters more than the streak.
It doesn't need to be correct. They will misread numbers. They will say "twenty-three dollars" when the tag says $2.30. Correct gently, move on, don't make a big thing of it.
And it doesn't need to be only the items they want. Sometimes I do this with random shelves: "That one. How much is that one?" The randomness keeps it from feeling like a lecture about the toy they're not getting.
When they start doing it on their own
Around age 7, sometimes 6, you'll notice a shift. Your kid will pick up an item, look at the price tag without you prompting them, and announce the price — sometimes correctly, sometimes not.
When that happens, don't celebrate it out loud. The praise can kill the habit. Just nod, say something like "yeah, that's pricey, huh" or "that's not bad, actually," and let them keep doing it.
Within a year, they will be reading prices better than you. They will catch you when you misread a price. They will notice when the sticker price doesn't match the shelf price. They will, at age 9, point out that the per-ounce label on the cereal box says one cereal is actually cheaper than the other even though the box looks more expensive.
That's the whole game. The 90-second drill compounds. In two years, your kid will have a money skill most adults envy. You'll have spent maybe four hours total, distributed across hundreds of grocery trips.
The price tags were there the whole time. You just have to point.