A Lesson on Money

This month I have been trying to think of important things that I think a 1st grader should know that hasn't come up in any of our "curriculum." We worked on writing his full name, and address. He has already learned how to tell time and the days of the week and months of the year last year. The next thing that I thought we should work on was money. Nick is pretty good about knowing his dollar bills, but except for the quarter (needed for video games at the pizza place) he did not know the difference between the other coins and what they were worth. I started out by going to the computer to print out some worksheets off of the Internet, but my printer is not working all that great and it didn't sound like much fun. So, instead we went for some hands on learning at the kitchen table. We made stacks of each coin to equal a dollar. Then we talked about the different coins and how much they were worth. We also practiced counting them by 10's, 5's ect... Then we played "store" and practiced "buying" things for a set price and deciding which coins we should use to buy the item. For Alex we kept it very simple," Count out 3 pennies to buy this seashell." Nick's was a little bit harder using pennies, nickles, dimes, and quarters. The boys had fun doing this activity. I think they really learned a lot, and we will be practicing this again very soon.

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