Money has not come easy at our house for our first graders. I have tried several times and then put it away.

Of course, the children get coins for their allowance and we give them opportunities to spend the coins, but they just haven’t caught on to the four coins and their names and amounts.

They do have the penny and its value of one cent down. I suspect this is in large part due to the different color of this coin. It also helps that you can count pennies by ones.

I plan to do several coin activities this week, keeping them active and fun.

For today, we tried an idea I saw on Pinterest of course. I pinned it to my Math Ideas board, but the original link seems to be broken. You can still get an idea of what to do from the image.

I gave each of them a piece of recycled copy paper (printing mishap on back side) and used a sharpie to divide it into four sections. I then wrote four amounts on each of their papers, using both forms of writing the amount (e.g 11¢ and $0.11).

They had a lot of fun using black markers to add legs, antennae and wings to their coin critters. They now have the nickel more solidified in their minds. They aren’t counting by 5s consistently just yet, but they were able to use the nickel to add up teen numbers along with pennies as needed. The photo below is Li’l Miss’s finished page of coin critters (though I see the 9¢ has a missing head; it was there when she finished it; not sure what happened to it LOL!).

Tomorrow, I plan to work on money with some other ideas I have on my Math Boards pinterest page as well as spend some time with this wonderful resource, Money Song, that I found at Teachers Pay Teachers. Go download one for yourself for FREE. Happy coin counting! I’m linking up to love2learn2days’s Math Monday blog hop.