Helping Kids Achieve Financial Literacy

April is Financial Literacy month. How financially literate are your children? Today's kids are pretty good at spending money, but very few are getting any lessons about earning, saving and investing money. Here are some easy -- and fun -- ways to solve that problem.

Your children are playing all kinds of games online, so why shouldn't some of them teach about money? That's the premise of a variety of Web sites instituted by financial services firms, hoping to get your kids off to a good financial start.

The latest, and easily the most creative, of those sites is offered by A.G. EdwardsAGE, the national brokerage firm. It's called Savings Quest, and the opening narration tells kids that it's a game that tests your ability to "save for the things you want, while paying for all the things you need." Players pick a job, build a budget to pay real bills, deal with unexpected expenses and still set aside enough money to reach a specific savings goal.

The interactive graphics and sound, as well as the "attitude" of the audio game guide, combine to make this a pretty enticing site for young teens. Sophie Beckmann, financial planning specialist at A.G. Edwards, who helped create the game, says it was tested on kids, including her 12-year-old, and designed to appeal to a generation that knows how to learn from fast-paced, stimulating online environments.