Presidents’ Day is the perfect day for math activities including money math, graphing, and more.
See my post Math Picture Books About Money for book ideas!
Money Math For Primary Grades
- Coin Sort– sort pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters and practice identifying their values. Choose between this simple sorting chart for young children to sort just pennies and quarters or a sorting chart for all 4 coins from Teach Beside Me.
- Make equivalent values of coins in different ways.
- Play Race to $1.00.
- Graphing Make a bar graph or picture graph of how many of each coin you have. Here is a printable graph form.
- You could also do a coin toss and graph your results. Here’s a free graph form for that.
- Make coin rubbings. Have the kids make as many observations about each coin as they can and chart the results. Teach them the names of the president on each coin. Here, from Holiday Zone, are some songs they can sing .
- Play the Number Rocks The Value of US Coins song from YouTube
- Make patterns with coins.
- Make a coin book (Name the President On That U.S. Coin) with this freebie from 1st Grade PandaMania
- Print free “all about the coin” cut and paste printables
- Make a Venn diagram of the similarities/differences between two of the coins.
- Collect, count, and exchange money as you play Learning Resources’ Money Bags board game.
Money Math For Intermediate Grades
Explore the U.S. government mint’s site for kids for videos, games, and activities about how our money is made.
Learn The Faces on Every U.S. Bill with this article from Thought Co. It has pictures of every bill including $100,000 (with Woodrow Wilson’s face) that was never circulated and is worth a million dollars!
Practice fluency with addition equaling 100 by playing the money themed game Clumsy Thief in a small group.
Play Exact Change, a card game played Uno style where kids can make equivalent values of money.
Find free online games for practicing 2nd-7th grade money math skills at math games.com
Research and Graphing for Older Students
- In this activity from Eduplace students research what state was each president’s home state and graph the results.
- Yummy Math suggests you research presidents’ pay and graph the results. For an extra challenge you can learn about inflation and the Consumer Price Index to see what the salaries would be worth today.
Estimation and Measurement
In this fun activity from Discovery Kidzone students estimated how tall Lincoln was, then measured to make a life size paper doll. They then hung it on the wall and compared their own heights.
Other Resources
Digipuzzle has online Presidents themed sliding and jigsaw puzzles. These are great for developing spatial reasoning, an often overlooked part of math.
Practice ordering 4 digit numbers to put the presidents in order by years in office. The presidents are listed by date in this kids’ article by Ducksters
J.Daniel4’s Mom has this Presidents Day Counting Activity for preschool/kindergarten with several ideas to use it including ordering numbers, associating numbers with quantity, and combining to add.
Kindergarteners can practice number sentences and ten frames with this free Presidents Day Teen Number Math Book .