What comes to mind when you hear the word bank?

Ivy (age 5): Ummmm. A bank is kind of like a river hang... or where you get money from.

Miette (age 8): Money and bars [in front of the teller.]

Ivy: A bank is kind of like a salt air; there's a hot dog sale and sometimes people hang out by the bank there. A hot dog sale is kind of like a playground. Grass and seaweed in the boat in water and the whale and the lantern and the sailship and pirate and crocodile and whale. HEEEELLLLPP!

When were you last in a bank?

Miette: Last month.

Have you ever robbed a bank?

Miette: No

Ivy: What is robbed bank mean?

Is there anything you'd like to learn about banks?

Miette: How much money does it collect in a week? How many people go to the bank in a day?

Ivy: A bank is sort of like a zoo, with a swamp nearby. I've been to a zoo bank.

Miette: This is boring. That's why Ivy is attacking me.

How could banks not be boring?

Miette: If it were fiction, and there were kids solving a mystery and in the process learning about banks.
It could be called The Bank Robbers.

Great idea! What would they learn about banks in the story?

Miette: How many people come to the bank. How many men come to the bank -- how many men with brown hair, how many women with yellow hair. How much money does the bank collect? They'd know everyone in town and the robbery would be committed by someone in town.

[I told them the story of the recent huge Brazilian bank robbery, in which some people opened a flower/landscape store across the street from a big bank. Everyday the people in the flower store drive off with a truck full of soil. One Monday, the bankers returned to the bank after a weekend and discovered they had been robbed. None of the door or window alarms had gone off. The robbers had dug a tunnel from the flower shop to the bank vault. Turns out the flower shopkeepers were the robbers! They had been carting off the soil from the tunnel! After the robbery, the flower shop closed down --the shopkeepers werent seen again.

Miette was captivated. We agreed that the story could be loosely based on that real robbery.]

Would you read this story about banks?

Ivy: I want to play Candyland.

**

Addendum

Here’s the actual BBC news account of what happened in the Brazilian bank robbery:

8/8/05
'Record' bank robbery in Brazil

Thieves in Brazil have stolen up to $65m (£36m) after tunnelling into a bank in what police say could be the country's biggest bank heist. The thieves dug a 200m (656ft) tunnel into the bank from a nearby house in the northern city of Fortaleza. Neighbours said between six and 10 men worked at the house, rented in the name of a company making artificial turf. The theft happened over the weekend, but was not discovered until Monday morning because the bank was closed. Neighbours reported seeing vanloads of material being removed each day.

"It's something you see in the movies... They dug a tunnel that goes underneath two [city] blocks. They've been digging for three months," investigator Francisco Queiroga told the Reuters news agency.
The Banco Central said the robbers opened five containers with 50 real ($22) bills.
The value of the stolen bank notes has not been determined. However, police sources said the heist may have yielded as much as 150m reals, which would make it the biggest bank robbery in Brazil's history.