Description
What our Money lesson plan includes
Lesson Objectives and Overview: Money introduces students to money, including different values, money symbols, vocabulary, and more. Students will learn about each type of coin and bill in US currency, their unique values, and how to add them. At the end of the lesson, students will be able to identify and recognize the difference between values of currency, correctly use money symbols, and combine coins and dollars totaling given amounts. This lesson is for students in the 1st grade, 2nd grade, and 3rd grade.
Classroom Procedure
Every lesson plan provides you with a classroom procedure page that outlines a step-by-step guide to follow. You do not have to follow the guide exactly. The guide helps you organize the lesson and details when to hand out worksheets. It also lists information in the blue box that you might find useful. You will find the lesson objectives, state standards, and number of class sessions the lesson should take to complete in this area. In addition, it describes the supplies you will need as well as what and how you need to prepare beforehand. For this lesson, the supplies you will need are pennies, scissors, colored pencils, and the handouts. To prepare for this lesson ahead of time, you can gather the supplies and copy the handouts.
Options for Lesson
Included with this lesson is an “Options for Lesson” section that lists a number of suggestions for activities to add to the lesson or substitutions for the ones already in the lesson. The first few suggestions are for the activity worksheet. You could have students use money manipulatives instead of money cut outs for the activity. You could also allow students to use calculators to check their work. If you’d like to expand the lesson, you can do so by adding a discussion about how to be responsible with money and how and why to save it. Finally, you can set up a mini store in your classroom for students to use to practice exchanging money and giving change.
Teacher Notes
The teacher notes page includes a paragraph with additional guidelines and things to think about as you begin to plan your lesson. It notes that while your students may have seen or used money before, they likely don’t know the individual values of different types of money. This page also includes lines that you can use to add your own notes as you’re preparing for this lesson.
MONEY LESSON PLAN CONTENT PAGES
Money
The Money lesson plan includes three pages of content. The lesson begins by defining money as something that is used to pay for goods and services. Most students have probably used money before. They may have received it as a gift from someone, received an allowance, or used it to buy a friend or family member a gift. Understanding how to use money is very important. There are different coins and bills that each have a different value. Students will learn that there are two different symbols that we use for money: the cent symbol (¢) and the dollar symbol ($). The lowest value for money in the United States is the penny. The lesson then goes over each type of coin and bill that we use.
Pennies are worth 1 cent (1¢) and you cannot use them to buy much. However, if you save 100 pennies, you have a dollar! We often see pennies as change at stores. Nickels are worth 5 cents (5¢) and 20 of them are equal to a dollar. Nickels are larger than pennies. Dimes, on the other hand, are the smallest coin. They are worth 10 cents (10¢) and ten of them are equal to a dollar. We used to use them to make phone calls, but not anymore! Quarters are worth 25 cents (25¢) and four of them are equal to a dollar. People use them in vending machines and to do their laundry at laundromats. Two other coins, the half dollar and one dollar coin, also exist but are not used very often. These coins are larger than the rest of them.
Paper money is used more often than coins. The bill with the lowest value is the one dollar bill. We often use these in vending machines, like quarters! Other bills include two dollar bills, five dollar bills, ten dollar bills, twenty dollar bills, fifty dollar bills, and one hundred dollar bills. All of the bills are the same size but have different designs on them.
Students will then learn that we have different words that we use for money. Some of these words include cash and currency. They will also learn that we have different ways to write different amounts of money as well. For example, you can write forty five cents, 45¢, or $0.45 and they all mean the same thing! The lesson includes some other examples of this as well.
Money Value Charts
The final page of the lesson contains five charts that show the value of different types of money. These charts include pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and dollars. Each chart includes a picture of that type of money (for example, it includes a photo of a penny next to the penny chart). The charts each include a number column (1, 5, 10, etc.), a word column (penny, pennies), what that value is equal to (1 cent, 1 nickel, 1 dime), and the value with the correct symbol (1¢, 5¢, 10¢). Students can use this chart to refer back to as they complete the worksheets.
MONEY LESSON PLAN WORKSHEETS
The Money lesson plan includes three worksheets: an activity worksheet, a practice worksheet, and a homework assignment. You can refer to the guide on the classroom procedure page to determine when to hand out each worksheet.
MONEY CHART ACTIVITY WORKSHEET
Students will work in pairs for this activity. They will first cut out pictures of bills and coins. Next, they will look at amounts of money and write down two different ways to make that total amount of money from different bills and coins. For example, for the amount of 27 cents, they could write that they need two pennies and one quarter or two pennies, one nickel, and two dimes. They must fill out the whole chart like this.
Students may also work alone for this activity if you’d prefer.
MONEY SENTENCE PRACTICE WORKSHEET
For the practice worksheet, students will complete two short exercises. The first exercise asks students to determine the amount of money for each given money sentence. The second exercise asks them to look at boxes that have pictures of money in them and write down the total amount of money in each box.
MONEY HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT
The homework assignment asks students to answer questions and complete sentences related to money. Students will use what they’ve learned during the lesson to complete this homework assignment.
Worksheet Answer Keys
This lesson plan includes answer keys for the activity worksheet, the practice worksheet, and the homework assignment. If you choose to administer the lesson pages to your students via PDF, you will need to save a new file that omits these pages. Otherwise, you can simply print out the applicable pages and keep these as reference for yourself when grading assignments.