Money, Money, Money!

Money time! Nope, not in my paycheck or any craziness like that - just the joy of playing with plastic coins that never, ever accidentally fly across the room when we're supposed to be counting by 5's or 10's. Funny how those suckers get so slippery in the hands of antsy 8 year olds...<insert MASSIVE eye-roll here>

I actually spent a bit of time figuring out how to keep those coins on the desks and in their hands instead of flying around the room and ending up on the floor. I'm not sure I've come up with the perfect solution to that, BUT I did kind of accidentally create a game in the process! I've seen the race to a 100 games and things on Pinterest, so I guess that was kind of rattling around in my brain. I came up with a Race to a Quarter version. The top half is upside down so that two kids can sit facing each other with the game board in the middle of them and each can see their own side of the board right side up (please tell me that makes sense...) Here's the board - just click on it to download from GoogleDocs.

Now, here's the fun part. I made some money dice! I had picked up these little wooden squares at Michaels for an entirely different purpose that I totally can not remember at the moment. They were really cheap, like $3 for a bag of 20 or so. I found them over in the woodworking section. Again, no clue what I wanted them for at the time...scary.  Then I took some of the plastic coin manipulatives and stuck them on the sides of the block with glue dots. Voila! Money dice! I think I'm pretty awesome right now, so if someone else has already created this, don't tell me.

To play the game, give each pair of kids one game board, one money cube and some small markers to cover the spaces on the board. Have the kids take turns rolling the cube and cover up the same amount of spaces as the coin they land on. If they roll a penny, they can cover one space, a nickel 5 spaces, etc. The first player to roll to 25 cents is the winner.

Have fun my friends! I have a few more ideas for teaching money, so as long as someone hides my Kindle, I'll have them posted in the next few days :)