The Kingdom Code: A Review

The primary purpose of education is to prepare students for the future.  That future often involves college or trade school, but compared to the rest of their life, post-high school education usually only lasts a few years.  However, a student's relationship with money will continue with them their entire life.  As a person who has made several financial mistakes in my life, setting my children up with a well-rounded and Godly understanding of money is a priority.  Thankfully, there are others out there who feel the same!  Today I'm reviewing The Complete Starter Kit, the JR Budget Kit and The Kingdom Code Coloring Book from The Kingdom Code that not only teaches children about money, but equips them to pursue entrepreneurship now! 

What We Received:

The Complete Starter Kit includes a

• Textbook - Spiral bound with good quality glossy sheet pages meant for multi-use 
• Student Packet - loose, hole punched papers that are consumable and intended for one student that includes worksheets, activity sheets, forms, and Treasure Builder Ideas ( Business ideas for kids).  These can be purchased separately when you are teaching multiple students.
• Teacher's Guide - loose, hole punched papers that includes a table of contents and walks the teacher through each lesson, day by day.
• Receipt book
• Treasure Map & Reward Stickers - This is used as a reward system to celebrate the completion of each lesson
• Vocabulary Word (Card) Pages - These pages are thick cardstock designed to be cut up into individual cards.
• Binder Inserts - These glossy colorful pages are to slide into the front/back plastic to distinguish the various binders
• Budget Labels - The budget component of this program divides your money into Jesus, Others, Education, You, Savings and we received stickers to label containers for each part of your money.
• Online access to various resources including KCK theme song, business ideas for kids, printable form pages (extra), Teacher's Guide for a Co-op setting, and much more.

The JR Budget Kit comes with another set of the Budget Labels, Binder Inserts and Coloring Sheets.

The Kingdom Code Coloring Book includes over 30 high quality pages of Knights, Bible Verses, and KCK Budget pages.

How It Works:

This money management and entrepreneur curriculum is a little overwhelming at first mostly because there are so many moving parts and aspects of getting it all set up.  The Teacher's manual does a great job of itemizing all the supplies required and things you must do to set the program up for Day 1.  Each lesson will include 8 primary sections:

• Proclamation - Teaching of a Biblical principle
• Check Your Path - Worksheet instructions
• Quest for the Clue -Introduces theme and goal for the lesson
• Code of Honor - Teaches target skill of the lesson through the Character Code
• Treasure Seeking - Activities that reinforce the theme and goals
• On Your Own - More activities that are typically done independently 
• Kingdom Keys - A Review of the lesson
• Bonus Code Work - Optional projects to supplement the lesson

The suggested schedule in order to cover this in 36 weeks (2 semesters) is two 45  minute days per week.

How We Used It:

My school age kids are 5 and 8 so starting a real business isn't quite on their radar yet, not realistically anyway.  What we did was begin with the Jr Budget kit and broke down the JOEYS principles with the kids.  It is recommended to use 5-6 zippered pencil pockets with clear fronts to divide up your money in, but I decided to use large envelopes instead for convenience/budget sake and they worked just fine.  Since they kids didn't have much money right now (birthday highs don't start until July through November), we used play money and play jobs/situations in our envelopes to try our hand at budgeting.  This turned into a game that the kids wanted to play where we would assign them different jobs and life circumstances (car owned, married, health, etc.).  It was most certainly a real practice of real life possibilities.

The Kingdom Code Coloring Book is a great addition to what the kids have learned simply because the verses and the pictures reinforce ideas presented in the materials.  They took turns picking out a page to color.

The Kingdom Code Curriculum was a little advanced in the activities and forms for my 8 and 5 year old mostly due to maturity.  My 8 year old is interested in making money, but he's still fighting with regular chores some days and certain elements of follow through.  Learning about all of the concepts wasn't a problem but much of the business based activities was a bit of a stretch for us.  I do believe learning about money and starting your own business is motivating to him to get to that point so I'm very grateful to have all of these resources that, in a year or two, when he is ready, we can start this from the beginning again and take full advantage of it.  What was very helpful were some of the activities that introduced the different types of work and business kids can be a part of.  Even though they can't utilize everything yet, I feel like they have an advantage with a foundation of money and business sense already in place before it's completely relevant in action.

The Kingdom Code has been very generous not only to give us so many extra resources related to this program, but they've also given my readers an extra 10% off anything you purchase with the use of this discount code: 10TKC03

The Kingdom Code on Social Media:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheKingdomCode/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekingdomcode
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/thekingdomcode/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thekingdomcode/

There were at least 50 families reviewing this program, many with older kids who were able to utilize more of this program.  If you would like a different perspective, check out the other reviews through the link below.