I'm going to start posting a handful of the games that I we play in our own homeschool... thinking those games might fill a hole for someone else. After realizing that I simply cannot afford to buy a game for each and every concept I need to teach, creating my own games or tweaking games I already have seems like the perfect answer.
My kids are just now 7 and 5 1/2 and we've not done nearly enough with money... at least not hands on. I'm in the process of introducing a couple new money games a week to give my kids more than just workbook pages. I think the workbook pages are great for what they are, but honestly money play probably should have come first... I see that now. I think even a very basic game or two would have gone a long way in binding together basic money concepts in their minds. Not only that, but what kid doesn't like a good game?
Today we took an idea from the first grade My Father's World curriculum and added a twist. MFW has a great learning activity that requires the creation of base-10 sticks to give your child a hands on way of counting by 10's. You basically glue 10 beans to a Popsicle stick. Each stick represents one "10". You can then use loose beans to represent the ones. It's a great tool that we just never did anything with... until today.
Since my kids love games and we have a great play money set and a couple good rolling dices, I had my kids take turns rolling a dice, declare their number, find that amount in our money drawer, add it to their own bank (basically a pile on the floor) until they reached 10 or more cents. At that time they calculate how much they need to pay mom for a Popsicle stick and 10 beans... and announce to the group how much money they have remaining in their bank. They pay me for the stick and beans, keep their change, then roll again. We played until each of my children had 10 sticks and 100 beans.
They then glued the 10 beans to 10 sticks and at this very moment the base-10 sticks are drying in our living room window. When dry, they're going to either use markers or paints to give them some color.
Now, my kids know how to count by 10's and have for a long time, but I like that this new tool can be used to teach money concepts and even place value. My son is having a bit of difficulty with place value and in fact confuses it with adding numbers together. Just needs more practice and having a visual should help with that.
More photos coming, but this one shows you what we have so far. The money set here can be purchased at Amazon.com and while it's not the cheapest there is, I like it because it has a nice wooden sorting/storage case. The dice in the box weren't included, I'm just storing them in the case for future games. ;)
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