Educating Risa

We started off our homeschooling day with a game, inspired by this blogpost: Race for a Loonie! In Canada, our 1 dollar coin has a loon on the front, and is commonly referred to as a loonie. (Our 2 dollar coin is called a toonie). I figured this game would be perfect for Daegan right now, as he is learning both the values of coins as well as addition with regrouping. We got our materials ready: a big pile of coins and a dice. I started with a very simple dice that has only a 1, 2, or 3 on it (repeated):

I then laid out the coins in order of value, reminding the kids of the name (penny, nickel, etc.) and monetary amount. I explained how we would play and regroup the coins as we went along. It was clear that this mattered not a whit to Gareth (age 5), who was more interested in collecting coins with his favourite animals (beaver—nickel, and what he called “reindeer” (or caribou)—the quarter.). He was not at all interested in regrouping to obtain dimes (“Ships are boring to me, Mom!”)

 

We got busy rolling the 1,2,3 dice, collecting our pennies, trading them in for nickels, trading nickels in for dimes, etc. While this made the game go very slowly, it helped the boys understand the values and how to regroup. When we all got our first quarter, we switched to regular dice (1 through 6), and now the kids understood that when you rolled a 5, you could simply take a nickel rather than 5 pennies.

Daegan ended up winning the game. He came agonizingly close the round previous—and I made him count (and he did it correctly!) the 99 cents he had to that point. We went slowly at the very end, first cashing in the 5 pennies for a nickel, then the  2 dimes and nickel for a quarter, and lastly the 4 quarters for the loonie. We’ll play this game again and I expect he will be able to shortcut some of these regroupings. Another variant I plan to try, once he’s a bit stronger on money values, is having to put back coins if you miss an opportunity to regroup. He’s keen to try Race for a Toonie next time. We will also try Race for $10 using my coin dice (it has 1c, 5c, 10c, 25c, $1 and $2 on the six sides). 

Here’s Daegan with the winning loonie: