Teaching money makes my head spin

Guess what?! Despite the fact that we have 34 days of school left (yes, I just counted) we will finish our math curriculum on Wednesday.

And do you know what that means?

IT'S TIME TO PARTY!

Okay well sort of. We will party because we will have completed all the curriculum for the year, but we will also party because it's means we can now move on to practice what my firstie friends really need to practice and have a little fun too. (Can we say buh-bye workbooks?!)

Up first-ish is money. I swear, I love, love teaching my little friends, but when it comes to teaching money (and time), I just want to run screaming to 5th grade (of course there I'd have to teach positive and negative integers, so maybe I take that back).

I've learned my kiddos l-o-v-e using spinners (that is once I taught them how to hold two corners with one hand, while they spin with the other). I bought some clear plastic spinners from Nasco and we've been using them with Jessica Meacham's spin and write games, so I decided to carry over the love to math.

I created a basic coin spinner, which they will use with a variety of game sheets depending on their level of money understanding. Eventually (read: this summer) I'll load all of the spinner varieties and game sheets into one document it and upload it, but for now, here is one of the basic spinner templates and game sheets.

(Click picture to download)

I created this game because some of my special friends are still having difficulty recalling the names and values of the the four basic coins. Hopefully the constant repetition of this game will help drill those names and values in their cute little brains. 

To play, the students take turns spinning the spinner and matching the coin spun to a coin value on their game sheet. First person to fill an entire column wins. Or to make it last longer you could say the whole board, or give a specific amount of money to be reached. It could even be played solo. Simple as that!

Now if only teaching money was that simple...

Have you finished your curriculum yet? What have you been doing/ what are you going to do when you do?