Rolling coins for math

This was a late August homeschool lesson, but I've had so little time for blogging that I am just getting to post about it now! And only if the baby sleeps a few more minutes!

The pink dinosaur bank and a jar or two were getting pretty full, so I thought it'd be fun to roll coins and do a little math in the process. We got all our coins, a few colored bowls, and some wrappers out and got to work. I let the kids sort the coins. I really just grabbed some plastic bowls from the kitchen without thinking, but the different colors came in handy. I could tell Ivey, "that's a quarter; it goes in the pink bowl." The lengthy coin sorting process allowed for lots of hands-on discussion and practice identifying coins. Does it have ridges? Then it's worth more. If someone said they'd trade you their penny for your dime, would that be a good deal?

I did most of the counting and rolling, but while I did it I took the opportunity to show the girls skip counting--mostly by twos with the pennies and tens with the dimes. Skip counting is something I had a hard time grasping as a child, and I think I might continue to get the coin jar out whenever we work on it. Money serves as a manipulative to let you put your hands on skip counting and helps bring it into the real world.

Once all the coins were rolled, I let the girls feel how heavy they all were. It was hard to hold that bowl up, but Ivey is strong!

Then we visited the bank. Now, I realize you can take all your coins to a machine in the grocery store that will do everything I just talked about and spit the cash out into your hand within a couple of minutes. But then you would miss out on the money lesson. So we went to the bank with our heavy bowl of coins and turned it in for some paper money, which was much lighter! I think Jordan might have been a little embarrassed to have his picture taken in the bank!

Finally, we went shopping. We bought movies to watch together and other fun stuff, and let the girls "pay the lady." When I was little, my parents helped me roll coins so I'd have money to spend when we went on vacation. I remember rolling coins for Disney World! But we are not going to Disney World until Robert is old enough to enjoy himself, so we figured for this roll-up, we might as well have a little fun right now!

Now the dinosaur bank is hungry, but he'll be full again before too long. Maybe next time we will be rolling coins for Disney World. I hope so!