Lookin' So Cool With My Coins In My Hands

Jill (Cruz'n Into First) is such a sweetie... she was so complimentary of my math teaching this week and really inspired me  to put a little extra effort in!  Everyday Math has a LOT of paperwork and sometimes the kids just aren't ready for it, or don't have the attention span.  I also learned at Purdue that a lot of times what my first grade kiddos can do and understand is much more that what they can represent in written form.  I gotta admit that the hands-on stuff is WAY more fun for me anyway.  We have much more meaningful discussions and get so much more out of those activities than a workbook page, but you all have been there!  Unfortunately worksheets are a necessary evil when I have to have some written assessments... and they do have to learn mathematical notation sometime! :)

On Thursday in Everyday Math, the goal was to learn to identify and count dimes.  My kids have had a lot of trouble with identifying coins, as first graders seem to do every year.  The penny is easy, but it's all downhill from there!  I have found Mr. Harry over at HarryKindergarten on YouTube to be an absolute lifesaver!  Here are some songs/videos we have used to help us with coins:

Coins in My Hands

Secret Agent Coins

Show Me the Money

I didn't know how much these songs were really sinking in until we worked on dimes yesterday.  I put all these coins in the pocket chart and had kids volunteer to come find dimes.

I asked the kids to explain the traits that helped them determine that it was a dime (we had been working on the word traits in science).  They used color, size, and features of the heads and tails sides.  One of my girls who had been consistently calling a nickel a dime came up and correctly identified a dime.  When I asked her how she knew it was a dime, she said she remembered from the song that a dime had a torch and some branches... yeah, Mr. Harry!!!  Kids also knew to look for Roosevelt... impressive!   We then identified nickels as well.

One of my smarties said he found a dime and grabbed 2 nickels, so that led us into talk about equivalency...

Finally, we played Coin Top-It with the coin card deck from Everyday Math.  I was thinking about having a make and take session with parents where they could use some coin stamps to make their own cards like this for home.  I feel like I have parents coming in and volunteering all the time, but I want to give back and maybe use some of my plan time to help them with some stuff for home.  We will see if there is an interest for me to do something like that.  Anyway, here is a picture of a round of Top-It.  If you aren't familiar, Top-It is basically like War... highest card wins.

We never did get to the worksheets, but the kids had written homework, so we will just have to catch up on the rest another day!  There just never seems to be enough time to do it all, but many of the kids met our learning goal to identify and count dimes!  Yeah!!