Fun Money Lesson Plans for Tax Day

Patria Lincoln Posted On Apr 16, 2018 | Math

Tax Day is upon us, and while that may sound like a super boring lesson to weave into your classroom, money and financial literacy are important math topics to include not only during tax season, but year-round. Check out my three favorite ways to integrate money learning at home and school, as well as my rationale behind their importance and tips for making the most of money mania with your kiddos!

Money Play:

Provide students with opportunities to experience and explore money play. We all remember playing with fake cash registers, imagining we were working at a store or restaurant. Those experiences are important for so many reasons. Check out my favorite money play items from Learning Resources.

Below are just a few of the benefits of such money play:

Real-world math/money experiences: Perfect play for early money concepts
Exposure to bills and coins: Can be used to sort and start early discussions about values of each.
Money concepts introduced, even before kiddos are able to fully count money.
Language experiences with money and financial literacy vocabulary

Money Games:

Once your children/students are able to grasp higher level counting, money, and other math topics, it’s a great time to weave money math into games. So many students struggle with learning about coin values, spending/saving, paying for and making change. When given fun, hands-on, engaging opportunities to do so, you will see them love learning about math through money. My 6 year old son, Grayson, cannot get enough of this Buy It Right™ Shopping Game from Learning Resources! I have to convince him to take a break...and that’s a great problem to have!

Money Fluency:

Math fluency is a hot topic in education, and it’s necessary to help little learners build better fluency skills. By building money fluency skills you're building math skills! I LOVE the simplicity, yet flexibility and effectiveness of this Coin Cube Set: Heads and Tails from Learning Resources.

Check out a few of the activities I suggest partnering with them in order to build money math fluency in a fun way for your children/students:

COIN IDENTIFICATION: With heads or tails dice, students simply roll and record which coin they land on. You could keep tallies per coin and then have students compare totals for a fun twist.
COIN VALUES: Much like coin identification above, students roll and identify the coins, then they extend that concept by also declaring the values. Keep a tally of how many times each coin is rolled, and then students can total up final values of all coins by type to compare who has the most for an added challenge.
COIN COMPARISON: Partners each roll one coin dice. They then compare the coins landed upon and record the coins and the greater than, less than, or equal to results. Students may “keep score” by making tallies for how many times their dice lands on a greater than coin.
COIN TOTALS: Roll both coins and total up the value. Students may each take 10 turns doing this, and then find the grand total of monetary value rolled throughout the game. The player with the highest total wins the game.
COIN EQUIVALENCIES: Students follow the steps in the coin totals activity above, but this extends their fluency to a higher level. Once students have the sum value of their two coins rolled, they use play money to make a DIFFERENT combination of coins with the SAME value.

I hope these quick, simple, and super fun hands-on opportunities to weave money math into your daily routine have been helpful! Money is such an important life math skill, so see if you can weave something from this post, old favorite activities you already have, or new ideas that this may have sparked into your daily and/or weekly math routines. Your students will love them, and you’ll be helping reinforce money math skills (and many others) in a painless and fun way!

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Patria Lincoln | Posted on Sep 10, 2019

DIY Fall Sensory Bin!

Fall is here! Which means I get to put together one of my most favorite sensory bins of the year. Who can resist the smell of apple cinnamon and pine cones mixed with the texture of corn kernels, right!?

Every year I try to add in components that align with the developmental stage my daughter is in. Being almost 3, she is refining her fine and visual motor skills every day, so we added in lots of fine motor challenges and visual perceptual options this year. Toddlers also seek independence in everything they do, so sensory bins are always a great task to get them involved when putting it together.

Fall Sensory Play 4

Sensory Bin Materials

First, we gathered all of our goodies. For this bin, we are using corn kernels, play apples, pine cones, flat marbles, and play leaves as our main “ingredients”. You can control the amount of scent you include in your bin by sprinkling apple pie spice, or adding cinnamon sticks. My daughter does not have any aversions to scent, so we went with pre-scented apples and pine cones (you can often find these in the fall section of your local craft store!).

Fall Sensory Play 7

Next, I had her scoop and pour the corn kernels into her bin, and add in all of the goodies. I let her play for a while and explore the different scents and textures. She loves to explore using kitchen utensils (spoons, bowls, funnels, cups, etc) – she made our whole family some apple soup with a side of leaves and pine cones for dinner! All of this is working on their imagination skills which is fantastic for this age.

Then, the fun begins for me! Here are some fun challenges I incorporated into our purposeful play!

Fine Motor

Corn kernels are awesome because when a toddler plays with it, they are naturally practicing their pincer skills just picking them up and moving them around! I also love to incorporate various tongs, tweezers, and clothespins for her to use while she picks up apples or “catches” leaves.

Fall Sensory Play 8

Visual Motor

Sorting tasks are always a big hit. I had her sort out red apples, green apples, yellow leaves, and green leaves. You can also work on patterning or visual model copying. For my daughter, I lined up a couple objects (red apple, green leaf, pine cone) and had her find the matching objects in the bin and line them up in the same order.

Fall Sensory Play 5 Fall Sensory Play 6

Stereognosis

This is a high-level perceptual skill that I love to throw in when planning activities. Stereognosis is the ability to perceive an object from touch – sensory bins are perfect for this because you can hide a pine cone underneath the corn kernels, have them dig in, and see if they can find the pine cone only by touch. I can’t tell you how intrinsically motivating and fun this is for them, all while working on some amazing developmental skills.

Fall Sensory Play 3

The thing I really love about sensory bins is that they are easily adaptable to any age group. If your little one is younger, try adding the corn kernels to a clear bottle with some leaves and pom poms and have them roll it all around. Watch them in awe as they see the goodies move all around inside the bottle and hear the sounds of the kernels as they slide!

Save it for later!