Money is a powerful tool for teaching students to compute. Children naturally want to know about money, and though money concepts can be difficult for them to understand, once they do, they can easily learn to count and compare money amounts. Patience and practice are essential.

In order for students to understand how to count money amounts they need to develop their skip-counting skills. Counting money involves counting on and skip counting by 5s, 10s and 25s. To count coins, children need to understand how to sort the coins to make counting easiest. They need to sort them by starting with the coin of highest value and then the coin of next-highest value, continuing until all coins have been sorted into groups. Once children have grouped the coins, they then can skip count to find the amounts.

For the last two weeks, we have diligently practiced these skills using many different fun learning activities. Our second graders have become quite proficient at their money counting skills!