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In the past few days I decided it's time for my younger girl to start learning how to recognize coins and learn the cent-values of various coins. She's generally been doing kindergarten-1st grade addition and subtraction and I figured she's ready.
First, I got a pile of pennies, a pile of nickels, and a pile of dimes (no quarters at first). We played where I told her to make a certain amount, such as "Make 24 cents." She made it, I checked. Then she told me to make some amount. We just take turns.
It's like a game, and great fun for her! I figure it'll work the same with other kindergarten or 1st grade kids.
Since she did pretty good, I was able to introduce quarters the next day. I showed her that two of them makes 50, and we practiced making 62 or 58 or other such amounts that use 2 quarters.
Then I showed her a quarter and a nickel, and we figured out how much that was. That's always a difficult thing - to combine just one quarter with other coins. I soon asked her to make 30 cents, or 32 - and she was able to use the quarter and nickel combination to make 30 cents.
One important thing I've done is that I have deliberately NOT yet introduced the words "nickel", "dime", and "quarter". She's heard of the penny so much that she was fine with that. I want to scaffold the teaching so that we'll first learn the coin values, and later the customary names.
So, in essence, for now I've been calling them as "5-cent coin", "10-cent coin", and "25-cent coin". Has anyone else done that?
6 comments:
Thank you! I am going to do this with my 6 yr old son. I was never good at math in school so this blog will help tremendously! Thank you so much. I am bookmarking so that I can refer back to it. :)
I just started doing this with my son last week. I'm doing the same thing, using 5 cents, 10 cents etc.
That way I think the numerical value will be easier to learn than if I said, dime or quarter.
I did this with my daughter and she loved it. she also was frustrated when I introduced the names of the coins too early.
She is still struggling with purchasings something and only have a dollared bill to pay for it. Working on that.
I really like this. I do this with developmently delayed teens and they like sorting and handling the coins. I think your strategy of naming the coins first is effective and I am going to use your idea. Thanks.
That's a great idea about using the numerical values instead of the names of the coins. Thanks.
We have cents and dollars in Singapore but we just call it 1 cent, 5 cents, 10 cents, 20 cents and 50 cents. So yes, I think its okay not to name the coins at first.
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