Do you have a penny?

The importance of being able to work with change, dollar bills, and the concept of currency is very critical to today's world. Why not start learning about it young? Leaning about what each type of coins means is very 'worth' while. Hopefully, the concept of handling money is quite interesting as a youngster, explaining this topic would keep the children interested because they can relate to it. To keep the enthusiasm running in the classroom setting, it would be most helpful to make it a hands-on in class project. Each student would be given a handful of small change and asked to create a certain amount of change with the coins to create specific values. Also, you could have them put the coins in order from least to greatest, how many nickels are equivalent to one quarter, ect. There are many activities using money that can branch off into other topics such as fractions, percents, decimals, probability and so on.

I would assume that most children keep a piggy bank and put all of their dearest coin change inside of it. I remember the first one I had was a big purple piggy bank that I carried all around the house searching for coins on the counters, floor, and searching in people's pockets. Nevertheless, the pocketing stopped after had I realized people pockets were not filled with any kind of money, instead I found worthless pieces of paper and I did not want that. I could do my drawings on bigger paper. Of course, if I had known that the green paper with a two, zero on it was not worthless and it was much more valuable than my plentiful assortment of bronze pennies, I would have kept it. Furthermore, and yet another mistake on my behalf, if only I had known the difference between a penny and a dime; a penny is worth one cent, and a dime is worth ten cents. At the time it meant nothing to me, and now, not that pennies and dimes make all the difference in the world, but I would rather have ten dimes than ten pennies. [I would hope that] a common question may be asked such as, if the penny is larger than the dime, why isn't the penny worth more? This was my first instinctive idea because I loved pennies and they were a different color than all of the other coins and..., well not really. In general, something that is larger than something else would be considered the larger quantity, and in this case, it would seem as if it had more value [through the eyes of a youngster, I was such a smart one!]. At first, talking about money was difficult, [as you can see, it was for me]. 

In the summer of 2010, I traveled to England, working with currency there is much different than in the United States. Because children learn when they are young what each coin resembles, going to a new country with new currency, new faces, shapes, weights and sizes makes you feel as if you just learning how to figure out what each coin meant. Instead of trying to figure it out, I just remembered that the thickest, gold-ish, coin was worth one pound, and the rest, I gave the cashier to describe trusting their honesty. I thought I was done with worrying about how much each coin is worth depending on it's size...