Money, Money, MONEY! Part 2 of 3

I hope you caught part 1 of this money series.

If not, click here to head over and read it!

First, pictured below is the money chart I referred to in the last post. Please do not be distracted by the ugly handwriting. I am not proud of its appearance but the kids appreciate it! We made this after the exploration activity mentioned in the last post:

Another exploration activity we did that the kids ABSOLUTELY loved was this:

I gave them a tray of real coins and some magnifying glasses. During stations, they were allowed to go over and explore the coins on the tray, 3 at a time. I put out several of each type of coin, making sure that it included a variety of styles. They were way impressed to see the new pennies and nickels and were AMAZED that I had an actual half dollar to show! They were also very perplexed by the Sacagawea coin because most had never seen one before.

One final thing to share in this post is an equivalent value activity. I showed the kids 30 cents in pennies and explained that I wanted to put the change in my pocket. However, I didn't want to carry pennies around because they were SO heavy and weighed me down! The students paired up with a cup of coins and an iPod (I have 4 in my classroom and only did this with about 10 students at a time, so 2 groups shared one) and worked on a solution to my problem (something we have been going over in reading!). Since a lot of them had a great background knowledge in counting money, this was a very easy activity for them. (I, of course, still had those few that had no clue what to do.) The students came up with as many solutions as they could think of and took a picture of it. To conclude, we looked at and compared all of the pictures to decide what was the least amount of coins I could carry to still have 30 cents. We actually put the iPods side by side so we could compare the amount of change quickly--that was really neat. Here is the chart we made after we printed the pictures (and yes, I had some excellent helpers assist in writing!):

AND we then had to sing our FAVORITE money song!!:

Don't forget to stop by and pick up a free copy of my money exploration pages!

Stayed tuned for the conclusion of  Money, Money, MONEY!. I will share even more about what we have been doing AND will be launching/giving a few of these away:

Have a terrific Thursday!