Playing Store

PLAYING STORE

I have been using a homeschool math curriculum for both of my olders for over a year. I have been very happy using the Saxon homeschool curriculum for Kindergarten and 1st grade math. Below is one of the lessons in the Kindergarten curriculum that I recently did with Brother. I wanted to share it because it is such a great idea for helping children with learning ordinal position, writing money amounts and counting with pennies. As an extra bonus, its pretty fun and both of my olders like to continue playing store long after the lesson is over. 

 We picked 10 items from around the house and used post its to label a price on each one. Brother picked a price between 1 and 10 cents. I gave him a little guidance to be sure he picked each value just once. 

Writing some of the digits is still a challenge for Brother but he is working very hard. I think the organic coconut oil ended up being very reasonably priced. 

Once all the items were labeled, I challenged Brother to put them in order from lowest value to highest. He wasn't sure where to begin so I asked him where we started when we count, 1! After that it fell into place pretty easily but if it doesn't, I would start at the beginning to help him catch on by counting 1 cent, 2 cents, 3 cents.... 

The next day Brother set up all his items in a "store" and I gave hime 10 pennies. He and I took turns be the customer and the shop keeper. 

When buying an item, he counted out the correct amount of pennies. Then we would figure out if he had enough money to make any other purchases. 

 I loved this lesson when I did it with my oldest and I was happy to see this lesson come up again with my son. It is an easy lesson to extend by using higher values for the prices, introducing other coins and many other ways.  Brother had so much fun with this lesson and had a great deal of success, too.  Win, win!