Friday, February 27, 2015
Learning about Money through play
I really believe that children learn best through play, after all, instead play a childs job? So what better way to learn about money then through play.
Prior Knowledge
Ideally, homeschoolers can learn about money through real-life situations as they shop for groceries and other things with their families. However, not all shop assistants are as patient as we need them to be when you have a child starting to learn about money. So I set up our own shop at home so we could role-play and learn about money at our own pace.
Prior Knowledge
The best thing about learning through play is that you dont need any prior knowledge. By playing with mooney, the learn will bcome familiar with numbers and learn the difference between coins and notes.
However, my son has an understanding of addition and subtraction and this has helped him with his learning about money. He also knows how to count in fives and tens which makes it easier when adding an amount together or subtracting an amount to find the change. We started off simple by just playing with the dollar notes adding fives or subtracting tens. It took sometime of playing with money before he was able to add dollars and cents together.
I was able to reproduce a photocopy of each Australia coin (both front and back) and print it from my computer. I then stuck the back and front of the coin together and laminated it. I wanted to make sure the coins were as authentic as possible so I kept the colour and pictures on the coins to look like the real ones. I also wanted the coins to be safe for my little ones (who like putting everything into their mouth) so I made them slightly larger then normal.
I did the same thing for the Australian dollar notes as I had done with the coins. I kept the colour as real as I could and I think that it turned out great.
I used a toy cash register from Kmart for $10 and filled it with our play money. We used old food boxes as our products and placed price tags on them to set up our "shop" for play. My son and I took turns at who was playing the shop keeper roll and who was the customer. When his cousins came over to play, this little shop turned into a super market with many busy little shoppers and shop assistants. Lots of fun was had by all.
We played shops a number of times over the next months and I could start to see a progress in my sons understanding of money (difference between cents and coins, dollars and notes) and his ability to add and subtract different amounts of money. We also used these Australian money three-part cards that I purchased from Get Into Homeschooling to learn more about money.
You can download a FREE copy of our Australian coins and notes from here.
I hope you have found this useful. You can find more hands-on math ideas from my Math pinterest board.
You can download a FREE copy of our Australian coins and notes from here.
I hope you have found this useful. You can find more hands-on math ideas from my Math pinterest board.
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