Change Exchange (free printable money game)

When big brother took his piggy bank coins in to the bank this summer, little brother was mighty jealous. Since he's only had his bank since Christmas, there was only $7.58 in it (which paled in comparison to the $56.36 our oldest had). 

He was confused about which coins added to a dollar. To reinforce coin equivalents (e.g. two dimes and a nickel equal the same as a quarter), I made a fun little board game.

I was surprised to see how much my 7-year old enjoyed it. He and I were having so much fun that our 11-year old asked to play next time!

What You Need
PDF of the game board, equivalent cards, and $1 fake money (download it free from Google Drive here)
Heavy weight card stock (white)
Green paper
Scissors or paper cutting tool
Lamination
Dry-erase markers
Die
Small objects to use as game pieces (a different one for each player)
Paper towel to erase the marker

Prep
Print the game board on white card stock.Trim the white border off the one edge on each page so the spaces meet up perfectly. Tape together.

Print the $1 page on green paper. Plan for $3 per player. You may need to print extra copies of this page depending on how many individuals are playing.

Print the equivalent cards on paper (office or card stock) and laminate. You'll want 2-3 for each player.

Cut all the money and equivalent cards apart.

Play
Each player puts their game piece on the word START. They roll the die and move their game piece the number of spaces rolled. Whatever coin they land on, they will cross off with the dry-erase marker on one of their equivalent cards.

When a player has crossed through all five pennies on that equivalent card, they can erase the marks with a paper towel and cross through one of the nickels on either the two nickels = a dime equivalent card or two dimes and a nickel = a quarter card.

Players continually cross through coins until the cards are filled and then they're erased and a coin of the equivalent value is marked through.

If they roll and land on a dime, but their dimes have already been crossed through on the two dimes and a nickel equivalent card, they can start a second two dimes and a nickel card.

When players have four quarters all crossed through, they are given a $1. 

Each player collects a quarter when they roll a number and pass the last space on the board.

The object is not to be the first to finish, but to finish with the most money.

Count the dollars and coins at the end of the game to determine the winner! 

I earned $2.56 and my son won with $2.94.

Money Trail Board Game (free printable to teach coin names/values)

Our six-year-old is learning about money at school, which is good because he's long been confused about the differences between dollars and cents.

To reinforce his school lessons, I made a simple board game to help him associate the coin values and names with their appearance.

Gather Supplies
You'll need:

• My (free) 2-page PDF of the game board and spinner
• A small, unique game piece for each player
• Heavyweight card stock to print the PDF on
• Brad
• Safety Pin (to use as the spinner)

Assemble
Once printed, poke a hole in the center of the spinner. Thread the small loop of a safety pin onto a brad and thread it through the hole. Open the prongs at the back of the spinner, making sure the pin spins around freely.

Play
Put the small game pieces on the words START. The youngest player goes first and flicks the spinner. Whatever they land on, is where they'll move their game piece (for example, if the safety pin spinner points to "dime," they will move their game piece to the next space on the game board that features that coin. Play alternates between players. Players must spin "penny" or "1 cent" to land on the final space and win.

Read
A great book to pair with this activity is Learning about Coins. Check it out!

This game would not have been possible without the amazing, copyright-free images from WPClipart.

“Minting” Our Own Coin

I’m pretty sure that my son is the only coin collector in the second grade at his elementary school. He finds money fascinating and since so much can be learned through the exercise of collecting coins (all the 50 states, the national parks, presidential history, etc.), it’s a hobby that my husband and I have encouraged.

I knew my son would go crazy for this coin craft. I was right.

Here’s the supply list:

1 sheet 6 mm craft foam (any color)

1 sheet of thin craft foam (any color)

A few sheets of dimensional letter stickers (we used foam stickers; thicker is better)

A silhouette-style photo of your child

Glue stick

Scissors

Heavy-duty aluminum foil

Spray glue

Black permanent marker

Before we got started, we read a great book about money, narrated by a cartoon version of Abraham Lincoln. Did you know Honest Abe had a sense of humor? According to author Jack Silbert, he did! The book Honest Abe’s Funny Money Book is a must-read for kids interested in money. It contains:

• A timeline of the history of money (e.g. 3,200 years ago, people in China used shells as money).
• LOADS of historical facts (e.g. George Washington is on the quarter; he was the only president that was elected unanimously twice!)
• Corny jokes, such as “What did the dollar bill say to the four quarters? ANSWER: I can change!”

Thanks to a little checklist in the book, we also learned the six things on every coin, including the phrase E PLURIBUS UNUM, the coin’s value, and the year it's made.

We were ready to make our own coin now!

HEADS

I cut a big circle out of the thick foam. We cut out the silhouette of my son’s face, traced it onto the thin craft foam, and glued it in the center of the “coin.” Then he stuck on foam letter stickers. When my son was done decorating the coin, I took it outside and sprayed it with a can of spray glue (Remember: ALWAYS do this in a well ventilated area). Now we covered the “heads” side of the coin with a sheet of heavy-duty aluminum foil.

We gently rubbed the coin to depress all the areas of foil and outlined everything in black permanent marker to make it even more visible.

After the leftover foil was folded around the back of the coin, we trimmed it, leaving ¼ inch excess to cover the edge of the coin.

TAILS

For the tails side of the coin, I sketched an eagle onto thin foam and an extra shield to put atop of it for added dimension. My son also wanted to add a banner. Cut out, glue on, add some more letter stickers, a circle of foil and VOILA! Our coin is almost done! Just shoot it with spray glue, smooth the foil down, and trace around the relief with marker.

I have it on good authority that this is the best coin to use for a heads/tails tie-breaker!

Moving Decimal (A Money Exercise)

In the process of brainstorming a place value activity, this little exercise was born. It’s simple and fun and takes next to no prep.

Just find the following:

A small black button, pom-pom, or a magnet (what we used)

Funny money (download some here if you don’t have any)

A bunch of coins

A deck of cards with only the face cards (just two through nine)

(I made some zero cards, although they’re not necessary.)

How to play

The child draws two cards.

Put the ‘decimal’ in front of him/her. How much money is that? Have the child use the coins to count it out.

The child draws another card. It is placed behind the other two and the decimal is moved behind the first card. Now how much money is that? Let the child use coins and funny money bills to show you.

The activity continues until five cards are on the table. Then you’re done or you’re starting over. You choose!

Yard Sale Board Game [Counting Money]

It’s yard sale season, which is a wonderful time to work on counting money! I drummed up a game to play with my son that works on the following:

1. Spending your money wisely (e.g. if you have $0.30, you can buy one thing for $0.30 or three things for $0.10).
2. Saving your money to buy bigger ticket items.
3. Exchanging money (e.g. ten dimes can be exchanged for $1.00).
4. Making change (e.g. you buy something that costs $0.75 and pay with a one dollar bill; how much change do you get back?).

What you need to play:

Poker chips (each player uses a different color as gamepieces)

The game board and money cards (download a PDF here)

Funny money in $1.00, $5.00, and $10.00 increments (you can download some here)

Lots of U.S. coins

Yard sale pricing stickers

Prep:

Once you’ve taped the game board together and cut apart the money cards, stick one yard sale pricing sticker on each item on the board (use only a few $5 and $10 stickers).

Objective:

Buy as many items as you can. The player with the most items purchased (i.e. poker chips on the board) when the entire board is filled is the winner.

Rules:

Play alternates between players. We played with two players, but I think you can play with as many as four. Each player gets $1.00 in funny money to start. Then, they draw from the pile of cards.

Whatever amount of money on the card is given to the player and he/she can purchase as many items as they’d like until they are out of money. A gamepiece (i.e. poker chip) is placed on all of the items that are purchased.

A purchase should be made during each turn, unless the player does not have enough money to buy any of the remaining items on the board, or they get the “Oh No” card. In which case, a gamepiece is removed and play resumes with the next player drawing a card from the draw pile.

Before we played, we read a great Mercer Mayer book. This got my son in the spirit of yard saling!

Then we both put on our game faces and raided my husband’s bowl of pocket change. It was a buying frenzy at first, but as the low-ticket items were purchased, the pace slowed. Now, we forced to “save” our money to see who would get the remaining few $5 and $10 items. This was a lot of fun and although it was intended just to work on counting money, there were loads of other lessons built right in.

I think we’re both in the mood to bargain hunt at next weekend’s yard sales now!


CREDIT: I downloaded the currency clip art from TeacherFiles.com.

Learning Tricky Plurals with a Prize Wheel

The other night we had the TV on during dinner and “Wheel of Fortune” came on. Since I consider dinner our special time to share news about each other’s day, this is VERY rare.

My son has seen the show a few other times (probably at Grandma’s house) and excitedly exclaimed, “Oh, I loooooove this show! It’s my favorite grown-up show!” Huh?

While he most certainly can’t solve the puzzles, the sheer idea of trying to guess the words, spinning a prize wheel, and winning money seem pretty darn awesome to my 6-year-old. “Wheel of Fortune” was part of the inspiration for this activity.

The rest of the inspiration came the following day, when we were getting ready and on our way to my son’s school music program. As I helped him put his ears on (he played a mouse), he danced around saying, “I’m a mice. I’m a mice!” Last I checked there was only one of him, so I explained that he was a mouse, not a mice.

On our drive to the school, some geese flew overhead and as he caught sight of them, he said, “You know what gooses do when they fly?” Oh boy! “It’s GEESE, not gooses,” I corrected him.

What are tricky plurals?

Those words that either change drastically (i.e. the plural version of the word is not the same as the singular version with an s on the end) or don’t change at all when they become plural (e.g. deer, glasses, etc.) are tricky for children to learn. This activity is meant to help kids (namely, my son) use those words correctly.

How to Play

I made 16 cards with tricky plurals on them. The cards show a single object with the plural version of the word under a folded section. (Download an 8-page PDF here, print them on heavyweight cardstock, cut them out, fold on the dotted line, and use an Exacto craft knife to carefully cut a V shape to tuck the folded flap under.)

I fanned the cards out in my hand and my son drew one.

Then he thought hard about what the plural version would be. If he knew it, he said it out loud (and sometimes spelled it, in the case of babies). Next, he opened the card’s flap to reveal the plural.

If he had guessed right, he got to flick the spinner on the Pretend Prize Wheel I made. I explained that he wasn’t winning real money. He was still thrilled. 

Download the prize wheel PDF here, print it on sticker paper, adhere to an empty cereal box for sturdiness, cut it out, punch holes in the wheel and spinner, and attach together in the center with a brad.

With each spin, he added the new prize money to his winnings. Beware of the “You are bankrupt!” And good luck getting the spinner to stop on “Double It!”

When the game was over, his pretend “winnings” totaled $3.05. Before we finished up, he read a simple book filled with tricky plurals: One Foot, Two Feet: an EXCEPTIONAL counting book.

Postage Paid (a Coin Counting Activity)

For a little coin-counting practice, I created this fun activity for my son; not only did it work on money and numbers, but it taught him about the postal system too!

You should have seen his eyes light up when he saw our homemade post office box. He was SO curious to see how we’d be using it in our activity, he barely suffered through the book we read.

I have lost count of the number of books we’ve read by Gail Gibbons. Her book The Post Office Book: Mail and How it Moves didn’t disappoint. Like the other non-fiction gems she’s penned, this book simplified a complex subject in a way my son could grasp. He loved seeing all the ways the mail moves from its origination to its destination – including the historical references to the Pony Express.

When we were done with Gibbons’ book, I gave him:

• A dozen oversized and laminated stamps I had made (truthfully, I made twice this many but we only used half)
• 12 envelopes filled with coins.
• The DIY post office box.

Download a 2-page PDF of the oversized stamps I made here.

His task was simple: open each envelope, empty the coins, count them, and find the stamp with the same amount of cents written on it (I used a fine-tip dry-erase marker to write the amounts on each). After he’d bought his stamp, he set the coins aside. He stuck the stamp to the envelope (there were Velcro dots on each) and “mailed” the envelope.

Because the stamps are laminated, I can easily wipe away the old amounts and write new ones on. Using the velcro dots is another way to make this activity reusable.

This was GREAT practice counting money and my son loved it. Once all 12 envelopes were mailed, he even counted the number of each type of coin he had “spent” on stamps.

It’s a Stick Up! (Counting Money Role Play)

Lately, my son is fascinated with money. I know, you think I mean spending it, right? Nope. He wants to know who’s on each bill and loves the ‘secret’ watermarks you see when you hold the newly designed bills up to the light.

To give him a little practice counting bills, though, I decided to make some funny money for him. (I wasn’t about to risk him losing all of our Monopoly money.) 

I printed several sheets of each denomination (1s, 5s, 10s, 20s, 50s, and 100s) on cardstock.

Once I cut the bills apart, it was time I put on my acting hat. I admit; I was pretty rusty (the last time I acted was in an 8^th-grade school play). Thankfully, my son isn’t a tough critic.

Download the clown-faced funny money here.
If you’d rather add your child’s picture to the bills like I did,
e-mail me and I’ll send you the Microsoft Publisher files to adapt.

I told him to pretend he worked at a bank and gave him a (shuffled) random amount of money. He needed to sort the funny money into piles and put the piles in order from smallest to largest denomination. Next, he counted each pile.

I made three columns in his notebook. Down the first column, I wrote each denomination. Over the second column, I wrote “how many?” And under the third column I wrote “how much $?” His task was to write down the number of bills he had in each pile and figure out how much money that amounted to (essentially how much money was “in the bank”). I added all his subtotals up for him.

Then, I held a stick up with a small toy squirt gun (don’t worry, it wasn’t loaded). My son thought I was being funny until I took some bills from each of his piles; then, his jaw dropped.

Now it was time to count the money again, recording the values once more in his notebook. After counting each denomination, he’d look at the previous numbers and tell me things like, “You took three ten-dollar bills.”

After he’d recounted his money, I told him that the police had caught the crook and recovered the money; however, he needed to count it to make sure that they got all the money back.

This was SO much fun that my son never complained about all the counting and subtracting. It really put his skip-counting skills to the test, too. Success!

Counting Money with Coin Caterpillars

My son just wrapped up a four-week math summer camp and loved it (he clearly has his father’s genes). One of the things his teacher mentioned that he should continue to work on was counting money. Imagine my glee when that very same day Miss Kindergarten shared an amazing activity and printable on counting coins on her blog. (Yes, I do believe in fate.) Her Coin Caterpillars idea was EXACTLY what we needed!

Rather than just hand my son some pocket change and her worksheet, I decided to make some caterpillar faces so we could create caterpillar problems to do now and later.

To make the caterpillar faces:

1. I traced a quarter onto construction paper and an empty cardboard cracker box I pulled out of our recycle bin and cut them out. 
2. I cut and bent a pipe cleaner in the shape of a “V” and hot glued it to the cardboard circle. 
3. I added glue on top and put the construction paper circle over it, sandwiching the pipe cleaner in the middle. 
4. Then I laid a pencil over the pipe cleaner and wrapped both ends around the pencil to make the squiggly antennae.
5. All that was left to do was glue on some googly eyes and draw a smile.

To make his coin caterpillars, I asked him to pick several coins and line them up in a row with a caterpillar face at the beginning. Underneath he wrote the values of the coins and then used a 1-100 numbers grid to count forward (i.e. add the values together).

So cute. So fun. And such good practice. Thank you, Miss Kindergarten!


Find this idea and loads of other great math activities listed on love2learn2day's Math Monday blog hop here.

Skip Counting by 5s and 10s

My son is great at counting by 10s, but when it comes to counting by 5s, he needed a little lot of practice. I wanted to help him understand skip counting (i.e., the practice of skipping over every fifth or tenth number) as well as help him begin to memorize the sequences.

When he got home from school, first we listened to the “Exercise and Count by 5s” song by Jack Hartmann on YouTube. Before you listen, I must warn you that it is extremely catchy and should you listen more than once, you will have the tune stuck in your head for hours, possibly even days. My son loved it! The more we listened to it, the more he wanted to replay it.

After we listened to the song a zillion times, he circled every fifth number on a worksheet printed with the numbers one through 100. Then, he drew a square around every tenth number.

When he was done:

1. I gave him 10 dimes and 20 nickels, which he sorted.
2. I explained that each dime was worth 10 cents and each nickel was worth 5 cents.
3. I gave him 3 nickels and explained that if he counted the first three circled numbers on his page, he’d know how many cents he had. After he said “15 cents,” we counted together, “5, 10, 15.”
4. I continued to give him more nickels (e.g. “If I give you three more nickels, how many nickels do you have now? How many cents is that?” Then we counted, “5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30.”)
5. I repeated this with the dimes.
6. Then I asked him how many cents he had of each. “100 cents of each! 200 cents together!”
7. I told him that 100 cents was equal to one dollar and asked him how many dollars’ worth he had. “Two dollars!” he exclaimed excitedly. He felt rich!

Afterwards, he fed the coins to his piggy bank.

A PDF of this worksheet is available to anyone that wants it. Just click here to download.

Counting with Coins

Money is still a bit of a foreign concept to my son (not how to spend it, just how to count it). He often forgets how much each coin is worth and what they’re called.

To help him with this, I created an activity that he can do again and again. It’s similar to Dice Roll Math but uses a homemade spinner. Using Print Shop software, a glue stick, clear contact paper (for added durability), scissors, a hole punch, recycled cereal box for sturdiness, and a brad, I made a spinner picturing the four most common coins (who uses a half-dollar coin anymore?).

Before my son started spinning the thing like mad, though, we read a few books that I checked out from our local library by Rozanne Lanczak Williams. My favorite was “Learning About Coins.” It was simple enough and helped him understand the values of each coin.

Afterwards, he spun the spinner and wrote the value of the coin that the arrow pointed to on a worksheet I made for him. One more spin and he had a math problem to add the two coins’ values together. He completed six problems and by the end of the activity wasn’t even using the key I’d created at the top of the worksheet (i.e., quarter = 25 cents; dime = 10 cents, etc.)!

When this becomes 'easy peasy' (as he would say), I'll modify the problems to add more than two coins' values.

If you want to make a spinner of your own, download the template here. The worksheet is available as well; click here. 

Where is My Money Made?

My son is lucky to have a grandmother who collects coins. She got him started young with a collection of all the state quarters. A week ago, my son pulled out his collector’s book and we began to read the introductory pages that discussed where the coins are made – at a mint (which I explained was NOT the same as candy) in either Philadelphia or Denver.

The book went on to explain that you can tell which mint the coins were made at by looking at the “heads” side of the coin. Either a small “P” or “D” will be stamped on the coin to indicate either Philadelphia or Denver.

A few days later, I printed a blank U.S. map from ColoringCastle.com and had him look for and color the states where these two mints were located. Then I gave him 10 of each type of coin (quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies). First he sorted the coins into four piles. Then, he looked at each to find the “P” or “D” and charted where each was made on a worksheet I’d created. The question we were trying to answer was where most of our money was made. (I have to admit, even I was intrigued.)

When it was all done, he counted the boxes on the chart and discovered that an overwhelming majority of our coins were made out west. To finish the activity, I had him circle Colorado on the U.S. map. This was a fun activity that we both enjoyed; it taught him a little about geography and a lot about money and counting.

If you want a copy of this worksheet, download it here.