Teaching U.S. Coins & money in kindergarten
What are the best ideas & tips for teaching U.S. coins and money with kindergarten students? Their shorter attention spans can create a challenge, but money provides plenty of opportunities for hands-on experiences to keep your young students engaged in learning!
Below are some of my favorite ideas for teaching coins to Kindergarten students.
Why do I need to teach coins & money in Kindergarten?
When teaching any concept it’s important to ask yourself, “Why do my students need to learn this skill?” Think through all the ways that learning about money and coins will benefit your class in the future! We use money almost every day!
Money is one of the skills that has the most obvious real-world applications. An understanding of coins builds a strong foundation for financial literacy, and leads to a deeper understanding of the value that money has.
Discovering Coins Through Hands-On Activities & Play
One of the best ways for your students to learn the coin names and attributes is to start with coin sorts. Give each student a collection of U.S. coins and a laminated money mat (as shown in the images). Have your students sort the coin collection into groups of pennies, nickels, dimes, or quarters. This allows your students to touch and feel the coins while observing their qualities and differentiating between the various coins.
Once students are more familiar with the coins and their attributes, you can set up a classroom store as a math center to encourage students to act out real-world scenarios with the coins. Items in the store can have price tags such as “3 pennies” or “2 dimes”. You may choose to include pictures of the coins on the price tags as well. Your students will have a blast playing with the coins to make purchases!
You can find more ideas for hands-on coin activities by checking out this blog post from The Measured Mom here. If you’re looking for detailed lessons, The U.S. Mint website also has a ton of great ready-made lesson plans for helping your class discover coins.
The Coin Sorting Mats shown in this blog post are a bonus file that you will receive when you purchase my Counting U.S. Coins/Money Math Activities Mega-Bundle from my TPT Store, here!
You can get both of these coin sorting mat activities as a free bonus file when you purchase my Counting U.S. Coins/Money Math Activities Mega-Bundle from my TPT store here!
Identifying & Counting U.S. Coins No-Prep Kindergarten Math Activity Pack, available on my TPT store.
Exploring Coins with Cut & Paste Activities
Cut and paste activities are a great way for your students to practice their new money skills! The possible answers are provided at the bottom of the page, and students just need to cut them out one at a time and glue them in the corresponding box.
Make learning money fun with my Identifying & Counting U.S. Coins Kindergarten Math Activity Pack! Help your students develop and practice money skills in a meaningful way using exciting money word problems and activities. Your students will have a blast learning to identify and count coins. This pack includes 10 pages of cut & paste activities and is available for purchase on my TPT store.
Even though this product is labeled “Kindergarten”, it can also be used with first or even second graders as well. Students will benefit from reviewing prior knowledge and skills before moving on to new material. You can use these U.S. coin activities for whole group instruction, small groups, math stations/centers, intervention/tutoring, and more!
You can also download a FREE sample of this product from my TPT store by clicking here. The freebie includes 1 cut and paste activity to help your students practice identifying pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters.
Teaching Coins with Open-Response Printables
For some Kindergarten students, a cut and paste activity might be too much for them to handle (scissors and glue can be a struggle, am I right?). Or, perhaps you want to give your students an extra challenge by eliminating the answer bank that a cut/paste activity has.
The awesome part about my coins product mentioned above is that for every cut & paste activity, there is a corresponding open-response worksheet that covers the same skills. You can pick & choose what you think will work best for your class – or even differentiate by giving some students the cut/paste activity and others the open-response activity based on their individual needs.
The Kindergarten Coins Activity Pack includes 14 total open-response printables, with answer keys included for every page! Every activity is aligned with the Common Core State Standards, as well as the Texas TEKS and Virginia VASOL standards. There are a total of 24 engaging activities to teach your kindergarteners all about U.S. coins.
Want to save money when you bundle two or more money products together? Click here for my Kindergarten-1st Grade Coins Bundle and click here for my K-3 Coins MEGA Bundle!
Identifying & Counting U.S. Coins No-Prep Kindergarten Math Activity Pack, available on my TPT store.
Final Thoughts on Teaching Coins in Kindergarten
When you use any of the above ideas for teaching coins in Kindergarten, you’ll ensure that your students are engaged in learning and will be successful! Be sure to leave a comment using the form at the bottom of the page to let me know what your favorite way to teach money is.
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