Learning about money

I love it when I have a good idea.

Dale began learning about money recently. I decided the best way for him to 'get' it was to use it, and the following game was born.

First I raided my change basket for pennies, nickels and dimes.

Then I found some food pictures from the sale paper that comes in the mail. (Actually, I already had some cut out from a sorting game learning the food groups, and since I tend to save things, there they were, ready for me to use.) ANYway....

Next I made a list of the food items I wanted to use, and priced them from 1-8 cents each.

On the first day, we only did pennies. So Dale looked at the list and paid me in pennies for each item he wanted.

As a side note: on some days that we played this game, when
Dale ran out of money we had this conversation -
Dale: I'm out of money!
Me: Then you need to go to work to get more money!

And then I would offer to pay him a certain number of cents for quick little odd jobs. (like putting socks in the hamper, or throwing away the junk mail, etc) This was great for letting him get up from the table and run off energy, AND for a
demonstration that money doesn't just come out of thin air. It was also
good for a little extra clean-up around the house, but don't tell
anybody. ;)

On the second day, inflation set in. :) (A little too much like real life there, but.... )

I kept the same items, but now they were priced from 3-11 cents, and Dale had pennies AND nickels for paying.

Third day, similar story. I simply doubled all the prices, so everything now ranged from 6-22 cents, and we added dimes to Dale's stash.

So - he has been learning a lot from this game, including:
-counting by 5's
-counting by 10's
-addition
-subtraction
-counting money with the highest value first

-money concepts in general
-problem solving

We're going to stop at dimes for now and pull out our store every now and then to keep up what Dale has learned so far. Adding on quarters and dollars seemed like such a leap conceptually we're going to hold off on that for a while.

I have loved how this activity has worked out for us, and I wanted to share it here for those of you who might be interested. You can see I didn't get to fancy with my supplies. I can imagine going all out and setting up a store and 'real' food and everything. Or you could just lay it out in your notebook and move along. ;)