Motley Fool Staff

As well as for making money, investing is also fun and educational. Try it one day with your children.

If you want to kick-start your kids’ interest in investing, quietly parking some money in the stock market on their behalf just won’t do the trick. Fortunately, there are lots of easy ways to help your kids learn about the market.

Most kids are interested in money — namely, how they can get more of it. That serves as a good initial motivation to teach them about investing. Once they get their feet wet, they might just realise that they enjoy the world of finance.

Still, before you start plunking your kids’ allowance into stocks, it’s a very good idea to play and experiment with investing. Here are some activities you and your kids can do together.

Build a mock portfolio

Have your kids make a list of the companies that interest them most. They can get ideas by looking in their closets, in their classrooms, on the High Street, on TV, or any number of other places. Search for companies your kids know, such as British Sky Broadcasting (LSE: BSY ), Carphone Warehouse (LSE: CPW ), British Airways (LSE: BAY ), Domino’s Pizza (LSE: DOM ) or Hornby (LSE: HRN ). Write down the names of 10 to 20 interesting companies, then record the current share price of each.

Every week or month, you can check the prices together, see how the shares are doing, and record the latest prices. Foolish investors focus on long-term performance, so short-term share price movements aren’t terribly important to us, but it can still be very interesting to see how stock prices move.

Follow your shares together

Along with updating your portfolio’s prices periodically, you can scan newspapers, magazines, Fool.co.uk and other websites for stories about your companies. Is Domino’s promoting £5 pizzas on Friday nights? Will this help the company by bringing in more sales, or will it hurt by decreasing the total profit? And how did the stock market react when it heard of this announcement? Did the shares go up or down?

Do some maths as you follow your stocks

Pretend that you bought 10 shares of a company. How much did it cost you? (You can include broker commission costs, if you want to be more precise.) What are the shares worth now, a few months later? How much money have you made? What return percentage is that? Following shares is great way to develop basic maths skills.

More school subjects

Investing can relate to most subjects in school, and give kids a bit of a new perspective on their studies. There’s obviously maths involved, since they multiply share prices by how many shares they want to buy, and perform other calculations with numbers from annual reports.

But shares can also teach history, as your kids examine how venerable companies like BT Group (LSE: BT-A ), BP (LSE: BP ), and Tesco (LSE: TSCO ) got to where they are now.

Science can also come in handy when researching today’s technology and health-care companies. As for English, aside from the reading involved in research, it’s always a good idea to write out exactly why you are buying a particular company, and why the company seems so promising.

Start actually investing

Once you’ve become comfortable with the idea of investing in shares, it’s time to consider buying shares. Why not include your offspring in the process?

You can open a share dealing account. If you’re about to buy 100 shares of a company, and your child wants to buy a share or two him or herself, you can just place the order together, adding their shares to your own. Just keep a good record of which shares belong to whom. Once your child turns 18, she or he can open a brokerage account, to which you can transfer the shares. (By the way, this may have an impact on your tax situation, especially if you are investing larger amounts.)

We’ve just scratched the surface of all the ways you and your kids can explore the stock market together. Even if your child doesn’t end up as the next Warren Buffett, the learning process should prove rewarding and fun for parents and kids alike.

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> A version of this article, written by Selena Maranjian, was originally published on Fool.com . It has been updated by Bruce Jackson.