Kids Wednesday: Learn to Count Money

We have worked on different aspects of money before including the names of the coins and the value of each coin whenever we get change somewhere or have to go to the bank to make a deposit.  My son was starting to get the idea of money (even though the nickel still confuses him because it is bigger and worth less).  We even got a puzzle with the money to equal the item for sale on the other side.  He has had it for ages but didn't really understand the concept so he mostly separated and piled the puzzle pieces instead of solving the problems.  The only bad thing is that these items aren't really worth the money on the item so it is a little different then learning the value of money but one step at a time.

We were away from home without our normal tools so I decided to make the most out of what we had and we taught my son how to count money.  We put the money in the Easter eggs and my son opened the egg and told us how much was in each egg.  We did it Easter morning but it is a great activity to do this week if your kids are like mine and don't want to give back the eggs.  If you don't have eggs, this is the best time to invest because they are going to be at least 50% off.

We counted in piles to make 100 (which he is really good at after 100 week).  We talked about how 100 pennies equals $1 so we took out a dollar and tried to do the bigger picture of how many dimes would make up the dollar.  He piled them on and counted by tens to get the answer.  He ran out of dimes and he knew that two nickels would also work so he put them in the dimes place.

Then, we got tricky and used quarters.  The quarters were a little harder to add because it wasn't by ones, fives or tens like he normally counts. 

We used addition and added 25 plus 25 to get fifty and fifty plus fifty to get one dollar.  He decided on the right answer after a little more discussion and I decided that we couldn't have come up with a better learning activity then this for money. 

He learned a lot about counting money and I hope that we will only grow from here.  I think seeing it and playing with it helped a lot.  He was interested in how the different money made up a dollar so I am sure that we are going to be doing this again soon.

I bought some pretend coins for him to play with so we will pull those out soon for a reward and he will be able to play store and learn about money at the same time.  Did you teach your kids about money?  How did you do it?