I found another children's picture book that's worth reading aloud in math to help students practice their counting while discussing money. In Spend It, by Cinders McLeod, Sonny realizes he wants to buy everything! He earns an allowance of 3 carrots a week and soon finds that everything has a different price. He realizes that what he really wants costs 100 carrots and may not be worth it.
As part of the Moneybunny story set, Spend It helps students to understand what it actually means to save up money and spend it on something they want. In the world of credit cards, this is a great lesson for students to learn. Many students rarely interact with cash or coins and miss the opportunity to practice those counting skills.
Consider checking this book out and then giving your young students an opportunity to practice by making a class store. Provide students with play coins and have them practice counting while purchasing pretend or real items in the store. I've even used this as a behavior system before.
Encourage older students to plan a meal using sales ads from grocery stores while staying in budget. So many students don't realize how much their families are spending on groceries and parents will thank you as students see how to stretch a dollar to feed a family.
Whatever activity you do, you are allowing students to work on computation and counting skills that will help them with mental math. By counting coins, students are practicing skip counting and combining different amounts. This will set the stage for multiplication and division fluency. By working with a larger budget, you are encouraging students to estimate and perform mental operations with larger numbers. It's really about a lot more than math.
If you want to try it out, check out my FREE counting coins activity below. With two different activities, students can practice counting coins to 100 and identify which coin would make the entire total.
In the second version, students have an open-ended version where they can choose several different options for the missing amounts. This is a great way to extend this type of learning for more advanced students.
Both of these are available for FREE by entering your information below:
If you need even more support, consider this quick video from the Math with Purpose Video Library that shows how using a hundred chart can help students to combine their counting skills while working with money.
What are some of your favorite activities to help students work with coins? Be sure to leave me a comment below!
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