Financial education for preschoolers: experience review and development of a program for children with disabilities

The authorities’ activities aimed at improving the financial literacy of the Russian population were initiated in 2009 by President Vladimir Putin. To date, a wide experience in the development of various financial education programs has been accumulated which should be analyzed comprehensively for further effective development in this area. This article presents an overview of the experience in improving financial literacy of preschoolers. The aim is to identify promising educational practices and the most difficult moments when working with preschoolers in general and children with disabilities in particular. To achieve this goal, two interrelated tasks were solved, the analysis of the preschoolers’ financial education experience accumulated in Russia and abroad, and the development of an approach to the adaptation of educational programs to improve financial literacy aimed at work with children with disabilities. The analysis of the Russian and foreign scientists’ publications allowed to highlight a number of important aspects in the study of preschoolers’ financial education: the priority of practical developments before theoretical comprehension; the choice of topics; the choice of adequate forms of classes; ensuring the educational programs inclusiveness; programs effectiveness evaluation in terms of not only financial knowledge acquisition, but also its impact on financial behavior in the future. The article presents the case of the Regional Center for Financial Literacy in the Volgograd Oblast on the development and scaling of an educational course for preschoolers “Cat Belobok’s Adventures, or Economics for Kids”. The course is designed for children whose development is up to the age norms and needs to be adapted when working with preschoolers with disabilities including those with delayed psycho-speech development. The successful implementation of the course requires the following, to extend the term of mastering the program, to develop options for the use of role-playing games, fairy tales and various theatre elements, to enter the course fragments to the content of other preschoolers’ activities (math, vocabulary, etc.), to provide “homework” block for joint activities of parents with children. The issues of ensuring inclusiveness in improving preschoolers’ financial literacy are poorly studied and insufficiently worked out. Taking into account the complexity of work with children with disabilities, the problem is very urgent. The most promising, in our opinion, is the research aimed at studying the relationship between the implementation of early financial education and the characteristics of financial behavior in adulthood.