Generations · Kids
Nobody hands an entrepreneur their business. No syllabus, no set deadlines, no instructor marking a grade at the end. Just a language of competence, acquired little by little through a continual process of trial and error. Each day in the life stacks failures as lessons until success becomes inevitable.
We built the SONO Generations: Builders curriculum to teach your children how to become well-versed in the language of real estate, starting with pronouncing “asset” at three and working towards calculating a mortgage on paper by ten.
Not yet on sale · the first four go out to the list
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Children pick up a language the way they pick up any language — early, out loud, and in stages. Asset at three, as a word to say. Mortgage at five, as something the house has. Equity at seven, as a sum they work out themselves. Amortisation at ten, in a budget of their own. The same vocabulary every year, rehearsed at whatever level the hand can manage, until it stops being a subject and becomes the way they look down a street. That is all these four workbooks are: seven years of rehearsal, so that the first time your child meets these words is at your kitchen table and not on a contract somebody is asking them to sign.
Spend. Save. Give.
All of it useful. None of it ownership — it is the school unit on money with a cartoon on the cover, and it stops exactly where the interesting half starts.
Ten ideas, three reading levels — six of them from age three.
Investing is not the last chapter here — it is page seven.
Four printable workbooks · instant PDF download · not on sale yet
Read across a row, not down a column. School teaches a topic once, in the year it is assigned to, and moves on — a child who was not ready that year has simply missed it. Here the lesson never changes between the workbooks; only what a child is asked to do with it does. Every image is a page from the actual PDF, and every sentence in quotation marks is printed on the page above it.
Asset
At three it is a thing you keep. At nine it is a thing that pays you.
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An asset is a thing we keep.Point at each sheep. Say ours every time.
Something you own that goes up in value — or makes you more money.Circle everything in the picture that goes up in value or can earn money. There is more than one.
An asset puts money in your pocket, or goes up in value. An expense takes money out.Circle the three that can earn money. Then six words into two columns, and an apple tree's two-a-day counted on in 2s.
An asset goes up in value or puts money in your pocket. An expense takes money out.Eight words now, one of them shares in a company — then $3 a day multiplied out over 5 days and over 30.
Mortgage
Four words, then a sentence, then a small sum, then a bigger one.
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A little bit. Every month.Walk a finger along the coins, all the way to the front door.
A big loan that helps a family buy a house. You pay it back a little bit every month.Follow the coin path from the bank to the house, counting out loud as you go.
A mortgage is a loan for a house. The down payment is the part your family pays first, out of its own money.A $10 house, $3 down: how big is the loan? Then count the months of a whole year, one payment each.
A mortgage is a loan for a house. The down payment is the part the family pays up front.The same house at $100. $100 − $20 gives the loan; $5 × 12 gives the year. Both answers left blank.
Equity
The word most adults cannot define, arriving four times before ten.
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Inside the fence is ours.Point at everything inside the white fence. All of it is ours.
Equity is the part of the house that is really yours.Circle everything inside the white fence. That part belongs to the family.
Equity is what the home is worth take away what you still owe.Worth − Owe = Equity, filled in for three years. Then: draw your family in front of a house that is all theirs.
Equity is what the home is worth minus what you still owe.The same table, now Value − Loan = Equity — and a question underneath: which year has the most? Why?
The money meeting
The same table, the same day of the week, for seven years. By six the definition has stopped changing — read the last two across.
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Once a week we sit down together and talk about money.Colour the picture. Who sits at your table?
Once a week we sit down together. You show the work you did, and you get paid for it.Real work, paid on meeting day, then planted in a fund that pays them for waiting.
A money meeting is a short, regular time when a family sits down and looks at its money together.Fifteen minutes, on a day you pick and keep, and nobody is in trouble. If there is money left over, the family chooses where it goes.
A money meeting is a short, regular time when a family sits down and looks at its money together.Word for word the same page — except that what is left over is now a positive or a negative number, and if it is negative the family chooses what stops.
Every page above is in the PDF you download · the list hears first
It is also the field trip no school is ever going to run. Class trips go to museums, where everything on display has already finished happening. An open house is the opposite of a museum: a six-figure asset with a price on it, standing open on a Saturday afternoon, free to walk through, and you are welcomed at the door for it. Whether property is your work or you are going deliberately to teach, two pages in these workbooks are built to be carried there on a clipboard.
Little House Tour walks a child through a property counting bedrooms, bathrooms and garage spaces, and writing down the street name. Curb Appeal Detective asks them to stand at the kerb and work out why one house looks cared for and the one beside it does not.
Both are in Little, Growing and Junior Builders, pitched differently for each age. They are the pages that get printed four times and go missing in the footwell of the car, which is exactly what they are for.
Little House Tour, the full page, free — the same file that is in the workbook, not a cut-down version of it. Print it, put it on a clipboard, and find out whether your child actually uses it before you spend anything.
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A school year sorts children by the month they were born in. Pick instead by the one in front of you — what their hand can do, what they will sit still for — or take all four and grow into them. Each is an instant PDF download.
Ages 3–4
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Ages 4–6
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Ages 6–8
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Ages 8–10
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Ages 8–10 · a supplement, not a fifth tier
For the child who has finished Junior Builders and wants the next real thing. Lesson one is a rental: where every dollar of the rent actually goes, and what one empty month costs. Lesson two is a fix-and-flip, budget and all — including the flip that loses money, worked through to the end rather than left out.
Coming soon
Email me about theseAll four workbooks · seven years of it, in one download
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A PDF. When they go on sale it arrives immediately, by email and on the confirmation page; today the only file you can have is the free Little House Tour page. Letter size, 8.5 × 11 inches, designed to print at home on an ordinary printer. Nothing physical is shipped and nothing arrives in the post.
It is a mini curriculum, and the word doing the work there is mini. Ten ideas, a page or two each, with a scope and sequence you could read in a minute — and no unit tests, nothing to grade, and no pacing guide to fall behind on. It sits alongside whatever you already run rather than asking for a slot; most families do one page in a sitting and then go and look at a real house. And if you left because the system trains the wrong instincts, be warned that most of what is sold to homeschoolers was written by people who left the classroom and took the syllabus with them. This is the piece those boxes still do not cover, because they were built from the same template by the same kind of person.
Too young for mortgages, certainly, which is why Tiny Builders never mentions one. What a three-year-old can hold is much smaller: this is a home, homes cost money, here is a jar with three coins in it, and here is a bush with more berries on it this year than last. That is the whole lesson at that age. It is also the foundation the other three workbooks are built on top of, which is why it is worth laying properly rather than waiting until somebody is old enough for the interesting version.
The waiting is a school habit, incidentally — the assumption that every subject has a year it belongs to and that arriving early is a kind of error. Nobody holds off on weather, or animals, or where food comes from, until a syllabus gives permission.
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