Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Cha-Ching! 100 days


Love it or hate it, money makes the world go ‘round. Well, not exactly- that’s physics, but there’s no denying its importance in today’s modern world. Building numeracy skills using money is a great way to get your kids excited about math. Plus, it gives you a reason to clean out your car’s cup-holders and all that loose change that accumulates on top of your washer from cleaning out pockets before throwing a load in. Ok, maybe that’s just me…

With our school’s 100th day quickly approaching, I’ve been scouring the internets and racking my brain trying to come up with fun learning activities for the big day. Although there are zillions of ideas out there, many of them are far too easy for my students. But this one was the perfect 100th day math activity I’ve been searching for- “How many ways can you make a dollar?” This is a good one for our class because the math books we use are made in Hong Kong so all the word problems deal in HKD, while our national currency in Vietnam is the VND with mostly notes and really high values. They don’t often get the chance to work with US coins and bills, so they were doubly interested.
 

For this activity, I brought in a bunch of loose change that I had in my stash from the states and made this corresponding worksheet for them to log their answers. Here’s a copy of the worksheet if you want to do this in your class. Enjoy!

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