Have I mentioned before that we love Starfall.com? The boys spend at least an hour a day on there (usually broken up throughout the day). Some of my best hands-on lesson ideas come from watching them play that online learning game. Today it was counting coins. Thomas loves to click the lever over and over again. Each time a penny drops into the penny slot. When he gets up to 10 cents it is exchanged for one dime. 10 dimes, of course, earns you a dollar bill.
This is easy enough to duplicate. So I decided to pull out the coin jar. Boy I'm glad I did! The boys and I played intensely for over an hour, counting coins and exchanging for different denominations. We took turns playing "banker".
Even Jacob got in on the fun. I was surprised how well he caught on.
After a while I left them to play with the coins on their own. As is usually the case, as soon as they were unsupervised the game quickly turned into a contest to see who make the biggest mess. There were coins scattered throughout the school room and down the hall. This is the part where Montessori training instructs you to immediately end the lesson and go on to something else. Instead I decided to make a game out of it. I challenged the boys to find all 100 pennies. To make this more concrete for them, I got out the hundred board.
They had fun scrambling to pick up the most pennies and place them on the board. Once the board was full I quickly put the coins out of reach and then we moved on :)
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