Teaching Coin Recognition

As a homeschooling mom, nothing beats the feeling of finding something that works for your child.  We’d been working on recognizing the different coins and how much they were worth with our six-year-old son.  Our son is definitely a hands-on learner so I knew worksheets wouldn’t work.  I found a way to play store and learn all about coins that didn’t cost a thing and doesn’t take a lot of time to prepare or play!  The silly part is all the other things I tried first.

Take one: I was really patting myself on the back with this great idea.  I took a big, neon sheet of poster board and secured all the different coins to it.  Beside each coin I included a bag with the number of coins needed to make $1.00 to give a visual example of the values.  Both my husband and I tried breaking out my beautiful poster with our little guy to no avail.  He would just randomly guess coin names and values, not engaged or learning.

Take two: computer games and apps.  He adores electronics, and we often find they work well for teaching him a new concept.  He figured out addition after 10 minutes with a free computer game (Tux Math), after I had tried the pencil-and-paper route for a week.  So we went on the search for games and apps.  The problem?  They wouldn’t start basic enough, but all tended to jump into adding coins together or making change.  Some even made it easy to “guess” by just clicking on coins until you got to the right amount, and we find he’ll take the easy way on those kinds of games.  Hmmm.

Third time’s a charm!  Finally one day I grabbed a dozen small items from our house, a pack of sticky notes, and the cups of coins we keep for playing games.  (I’ve disinfected them.  Yup, I’m a germaphobe.)  I laid the items out on the bench with a sticky note price tag.  He was so excited it cracked me up!  I mean, these were just household items and he didn’t even get to keep them.  He worked on choosing the right coin and “paying” for the item.  He had to tell me the name of the coin when he paid.

I’m obviously not the first one to try this and some of you may think: “Hello?  You tried other things before this?”  I suppose I thought it would take more time to prepare and longer to “play,” and be too boring with common household items.  I figured it would have to be more complicated to work.  (Which, incidentally, is a common problem for me!)  The real beauty of it is how easily it grows with his knowledge.  Already I throw him curve balls where he needs more than one coin.  It’s tricky because skip counting by 5’s and 10’s is not strong for him yet…but he’s motivated to learn by this simple game.