One of the students I currently tutor individually needed help last week with decimal place value and money. We worked on the decimal place value using my ideas in this post (Place Value Yahtzee was a big hit!) However when we started to work with money I realized she didn’t know the names/values of coins. She loves games so I wanted to find a game for teaching money.
I used money cards. (Mine are from the Right Start manipulative kit but any cards with pictures of coins would do.) We sorted them, matched them with real coins, and talked about the real coins’ attributes. In the past I have done coin rubbings with crayons but we didn’t have time for that. Then we practiced their values by playing Coin War, first with single cards and then by turning over two cards and adding their value together. (If you don’t have money cards here is a free printable for this game)
She loved playing Coin War and played it with family members every day of the week between sessions, so by today’s session she knew the values pretty well. We moved on to a simple but effective Race to A Dollar game that I “sort of” made up. (There are many common variations but this is the one that works for me.)
Each player rolled two dice, added them together, and took that many play dollars from the bank, trading for 5’s, 10’s and 20’s as we went. Then they also drew a coin card from the Money Card deck and took that many coins. Each turn I had her add the money to what she already had. She then wrote the running total (sometimes we recounted the money, sometimes we added the decimals.) First to $100 won the game.
This game, which she found very fun, practiced the following skills:
- subitizing (instantly recognizing) the numbers on the dice without counting
- addition facts with the dice (we used one regular six sided die and a ten sided die)
- identifying coins and bills and knowing their value
- counting out money in both dollars and coins
- regrouping to trade coins for dollars and dollars for larger denominations
- adding decimals
- recording answers on a chart
It was a very effective intervention game for teaching money. How I knew it was a big success though is when she said she would teach it to her parents to play with her. The real secret to math instruction is making it something kids *want* to practice on their own!
For a commercial game option for continued practice see my post Money Bags Game
For picture books for teaching money see this post.
