Money Lessons in Fantasy · From the studio

Why Is a Silent Mine Teaching Kids Where Money Comes From?!

LiLiLiGHT.STUDIO · 5-minute read

Ask a young kid where money comes from, and you may hear “the card” or “the machine in the wall.” From where they stand, that’s a fair answer. They see money being spent every day. They rarely see it being earned.

Every parent knows that money skills matter for their kids. At LiLiLiGHT.STUDIO, our team has created more than 200 educational books and comics, and we’ve learned that money lessons stick best when the story is fun. That’s what we’ve poured ourselves into with our new fantasy adventure novel for kids ages 8 to 12.

We didn’t want kids to miss one simple truth: money comes from somewhere. So when we set out to trace the path of money through the life of our hero, a dwarf prince, one question answered itself: what crisis could be more exciting than this? Dwarves, famous as the greatest miners of all, suddenly can’t mine anymore, because their ore has almost run out. (Not so different from our own world, where using up resources too fast can lead to a crisis.)

That’s how Dvaergard was born: a dwarf kingdom where every meal depends on one mountain.

Meet the miners

In The Dwarf Prince of ArcaMynt, the dwarves of Dvaergard dig glowing stones called Blinks out of their mountain. Blinks are both energy and money. A Blink the size of a bean buys a whole meal. The dwarves are proud of their work, so proud that they carved a motto right above the city gates:

SWEAT IS HONOR AND MUSCLE IS THE MOST EXPENSIVE JEWELRY.

All day long, the kingdom rings with the clang of pickaxes. Until one morning, it stops. Tinn, the bookworm prince, notices the silence first:

“That mining noise that is like the heartbeat of the city has disappeared.”

Later, at a meeting of the kingdom’s elders, the keeper of the stone ledgers puts it plainly:

“Numbers never lie. Our tribe’s income has been in the red for three years.”

And when Tinn opens his missing father’s ledger, the last line says it all: Current Status: Mine exhausted. Revenue: 0.

The miners of Dvaergard, and Tinn. Illustration by Jay P.K.

Why a mine gets through better than a lecture

A paycheck is invisible to a kid. A mine is not. We chose to tell it as a story for three reasons.

You can see the work. Dwarves swing pickaxes all day. The sound of the mine is the sound of the kingdom earning.
You can see the trade. Blinks go out, food and tea come in.
You can see what happens when it stops. The mine goes quiet, and suddenly every meal has a question attached to it.

The story is also written for ages 8 to 12. A silent mine is a mystery before it’s a lesson. Kids want to know why the pickaxes stopped and what happens next, and along the way they see that money doesn’t appear on its own. It comes from something, and that something can change.

Price and value in real life

These are the same plain definitions we use in our free Tinn’s Money Dictionary.

Word

In plain words

Real-life example

Earn

To get money because you did some work.

Walk a neighbor’s dog for a week and get $10.

Income

The money that comes in, like pay from a job.

A big sister at a cafe gets $200 a week.

Resource

Something useful you can use to make things or money, like land or time.

money, like land or time.A farmer grows apples on her land and sells them for $1 each.

In the story, the mine is the dwarves’ resource, mining is how they earn, and Blinks sold are their income. When the resource runs low, the income shrinks with it.

Questions kids might ask after reading

Where does our family’s money come from? A simple, honest answer helps: from work someone does.
Why didn’t the dwarves just dig somewhere else? Digging deeper or farther costs time, and it can be dangerous.
What happens when you spend more than you earn? You run short, like the dwarf kingdom did.
What could the dwarves do instead? That’s exactly the question Tinn has to answer.