Teaching money to kids - with a fundraising project
Teaching money to kids with projects
Projects are an excellent way to teach children about money. Our class discussed the needs of horses before we went on a field trip to a horse ranch.
A few teacher led discussions and books focused the children's attention on the cost of keeping a horse and specifically on the cost of one bag of horse feed.
We talked about the steps we would have to take in order take a gift of a bag of horse feed to the horse's owner.
Teaching money to kids - brainstorm to find ways to earn money
After coming up with many ways to earn money (a new event for many), the children agreed to sell muffins. It was a great experience for the kindergarten class. With the help of pretend muffins (blocks) we worked as a group to find out how many muffins we would have to sell if we got a dollar for every two muffins.
Our cooking mum organized parents to bring ingredients and helped each child to bake a muffin for themselves. She then made four dozen muffins for us to sell (kindergarten made muffins may not be hygienic enough to sell!).
The children made posters to advertise the sale, learned how to make a ¢ sign and took turns selling the muffins by taking them to each classroom and the staff room (organized ahead of time of course).
The children had plenty of time to play with the money, ask questions about the loonies $1and toonies $2 (Canada!) and we counted the money together one or two times.
Teaching money to kids - go shopping
We added an extra field trip to the local feed store, fortunately for us, half a mile from the school. I changed the money earlier for loonies and each child got to take part in handing money to the cashier (a patient lady!). They also learned more about the different kinds of food animals eat and got to smell and touch bales of hay. We brought our bag of feed back to the classroom.
When the day finally came to visit the farm the children were delighted and excited to give their present. Use real projects when teaching money to kids to give them a sense of accomplishment and success. Although much of this project had to have adult assistance, the experience gave the students a chance to participate in a problem solving process and to be involved in earning money.
