Learning the names of our coins and their values in quite a challenge for young children. They usually have little access to money or few opportunities to spend it themselves. Most purchases for them are completed by an adult and often are made using a credit or debit card.
Each student brought to school a collections of coins in a baggie. These include 10 pennies, 2 nickels, 2 dimes, and 2 quarters. Several times a week the baggies are passed out for the children to explore their coins. What a motivating experience for them to have real money to investigate. We are talking about the values and names of the coins, and ways to remember how to distinguish each of the coins. Today we read a story called "Benny's Pennies." Benny goes shopping and buys items for his family. The children are pretending that they are going shopping for something for one of their family members or friends. They are able to spend up to 10 pennies for their gift. They are recording their stories on the computer and typing their own stories.
Later in the week we will begin making "Fun With Coins" books. Using coin rubber stamps, the children will be using the coin stamps and crayons to create pictures for their individual books. A coin could be made into a sun, a flower, a head for a person or an animal, etc. More coins could be wheels on a car or the smoke coming out of a chimney. The class will be encouraged to use their imaginations to create colorful pictures using the coin stamps. This will help them be more familiar with the coins in a fun way. I predict that the most popular coin will be the half dollar because of it size and because we rarely see them.
We will also be talking about which coin is our favorite and why we like it. The children's ideas will be recorded and made into a class book for all to share. Guess which coin will be the most popular?
We have started to talk about combining a nickel with pennies to make change. We are practicing using "counting on" to combine the coins. We have used this same strategy with the concept of addition, so this idea is a review. The idea is to start with the nickel, saying, "Five," and then, counting on the pennies, "Six, seven, eight." We are also practicing counting nickels by fives and dimes by tens.
We will be setting up a mini toy store with prices for the toys. The children will pretend to buy the little toys using real money. We will reinforce how to count out the money using the "counting on" method. First we will count out the coins for amounts up to 9 cents. Then we will learn that there are four ways to make 10 cents. Next, some of the toys will cost 10 cents or even up to 15 cents.
We also have a large stack of paper money. The children have had fun exploring with these dollar bills and pretending they are rich. We can also use the folding money to reinforce counting out money over one dollar.
There is much to learn about math using the concept of money. The class is enjoying learning about money as this is a new concept for the children.
