The Teachable Moment

While getting ready this morning and packing up our stuff to take Chloe (almost 8 months) to her first baby storytime at the library, the big girls decided to dump out their piggy banks and combine all of their money. Initially I wanted to be annoyed with them, but then I realized that they didn't care that Sophie's bank had a year's worth more money than Zoe's, or if they ended up with more or less than they had before dumping out the money. So I scrapped the lesson I had prepared for today and capitalized on the teachable moment at hand.

We all sat down and sorted the coins and paper money. I had the girls identify the different coins by name, and then I showed them that 5 pennies and 1 nickel are worth the same. We got out their little cash register and they took turns "buying" erasers. I told them the erasers were worth 5 cents. They had fun choosing whether to pay for their erasers with nickels or pennies.

Next we worked on getting all of the money back into the banks. We started with one pile of coins and I asked the girls how we could divide the pile in half (this ties back to our lesson on fractions). Sophie suggested that she get 5 and Zoe get 5, so we counted out 5 for each. Then we counted out the leftover coins until they were all gone. For the next pile, we decided on the "one for me, one for you" method of dividing. For the pennies (which there were a lot of), Zoe came up with the idea of "drawing" a line down the middle and pushing one side to her bank and the other side to Sophie's bank. We discussed that to be fair, we should count the pennies in each pile to make sure they were the same.

Overall, this turned out to be a fun lesson for the girls. After the storytime (which Chloe loved) I took the girls to the store to buy something with their $5 that they took out of their banks. They were surprised at the cost of the different toys and items they were interested in. Zoe picked a lollipop and a book. Sophie picked a lollipop and some bunny costume accessories to add to her dress up collection.

No snack today - the girls snacked on crackers in the car on the way to the library!