Next year we are going to starting our social studies curriculum with a unit on economics. Very impressive sounding, right? In reality we are going to be learning the names and values for all USA coins. I have told my students for years (every time we study integers) that I want to do business with them because they have no idea how to figure money, but in their defense how would they? They just arrived in a new country and they carry around these crazy coins that are mostly the same color, come in all different sizes (which doesn't correlate at all with their value) and no one takes the time to teach them about the values of them. Years after arrival it's not unusual to hear an English language learner refer to a dime as the "ten coin". Then they come to school and have to take a standardized test and it gives them what is considered a very easy question: "Click on all the quarters." They don't know what a quarter is, look it up in the bilingual dictionary and find out that it is 1/4 or 25% and still can't pick out the correct coin. The student guesses in order to move on and their overall math score drops like a rock to a kindergarten or first grade level preventing them from gaining access to the more advanced courses. For their own sake, and the health of my annual evaluation score which is now largely based on test scores, I aim to end this phenomena and help my students identify and work with coins.
My unit includes a lot of great activities I've used in the past, which are described in my blog from 2014, but of course I had to add some fun new activities--four to be exact! All of the activities are available for individual purchase in my shop (just click the links or pictures in this post), or you can buy all of them (at a discount) in the USA Coin Activity Bundle.
The third activity is a set of puzzles. The math involved in counting coins is important, but not necessarily all that difficult for middle school students. What I really need the students to learn and practice is the vocabulary involved. I need them to be able to put various images and words together and recognize that they all refer to the same coin. The USA Coin Puzzles allow them to do just that. There is a six piece puzzle for each coin. The pieces include the front of the coin/bill, back of the coin/bill, name, value in words, value in numbers (cents and dollar decimal), and the number it takes to make a dollar. also included a recording sheet and a set of pictures for the students to cut/paste onto the sheet for students to complete and keep as a reference sheet. |