Board Book for 2-7 year olds

Modern money smarts, served on a platter (of choc chip cookies)!

Launching July 2025, Smart Cookies is a first-of-its-kind board book to help your kids make sense of growing up in a world of digital money and ✨magic✨ tap cards.

Great read for parents too!

Engaging Story

Join Frankie and Teddy on a delightful Saturday morning adventure to the market to buy ingredients, bake cookies and share them with their local community 🍪

Pockets to open and counters to slide bring Frankie and Teddy’s journey to life!

Conversation Starters

Key Modern Money Concepts

Bank balances, payment terminals, transactions, coins and debit cards… Smart Cookies introduces these concepts and provides a launch pad for deeper conversations with your child. 

Core Learning

Connect Spending With Finite Card Balance

In a world where card payments are the norm, understanding money as a finite resource can be tricky. Smart Cookies focuses on the cause-and-effect relationship between spending money and reduced funds.

Supporting Lessons

A Sprinkle Of Entrepreneurship

This book celebrates entrepreneurship. Frankie and Teddy purchase cookie ingredients, bake their cookies and sell them at their local market.

Foundational Concepts

Friendship & Community

Financial mindsets and literacy are essential life skills, but they gain real meaning when built on a foundation of healthy relationships. Smart Cookies weaves in the importance of friendship, generosity, and community at every step.

Why We Created Smart Cookies 🧐

In today’s world of tap-and-go payments, it’s getting harder for kids to truly understand the value of money. Research from Cambridge University* shows something pretty eye-opening: by the time they’re just seven years old, money habits and attitudes are already locked in. That’s why it’s so important for parents to start talking about money early — building the basics for a lifetime of smart choices.

Smart Cookies is designed to make those conversations easy and fun. Through a colourful story, it helps little ones see how tapping a card connects to real money leaving a bank account — showing the real cause-and-effect behind spending and earning. It’s all about giving kids the tools they need to feel confident with money from the very start.

*Habit Formation and Learning in Young Children, by Dr David Whitebread & Dr Sue Bingham (University of Cambridge) : Report commissioned by The Money Advice Service May 2013

Supporting your child through different stages of development and learning 🚀

  • Stage 1 🟢

    Counting from 1-5 as each cookie ingredient costs progressively more.

  • Stage 2 🟢🟢

    Counting up to 20 to calculate spending tally from $0 up to total budget of $20.

  • Stage 3 🟢🟢🟢

    Subtracting each purchase to calculate bank balance from $20 down to $0.

  • Stage 4 🟢🟢🟢🟢

    Multiplying single digits by 10 to calculate $30 in eventual cookie sales.

  • Stage 5 🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢

    Calculating profit after earning $30 on cookie sales, spending $20 on ingredients.

  • Bonus 🍓

    For the littlest eyes and ears: Spot the strawberries on each page!

Meet The Authors ✏️

  • Abbey Melbourne

    A Chartered Accountant and mother of two who is deeply passionate about building financial literacy amongst young children. She believes that equipping the next generation with essential financial knowledge is crucial for their future success and overall wellbeing.

  • Barbara van der Merwe

    Founder & Director of Mandy Money, Australia’s partner in youth financial education. An expert in areas of finance and education, she’s the driving force behind a range of award-winning publications and learning resources for young Aussies.