My daughter has been working on identifying coins and gets so confused. Any good ideas on how to help her?
I had some problems with this until I took some clues from my daughter. She is a people person and she would ask who the people were in the coins. Once she learned their names and a bit about them, she would identify each coin by the name of the person. Eventually, she could actually pick out the coin itself by what it was called. Imagine placing one penny as the only one among a pile of silver coins and the child not being able to pick it out when you ask for the penny, but when you ask for Abraham Lincoln, she not only could pick it out, but she would say: "He was a president who died from being shot when he watching a play. It is worth one cent. It is made of copper. When it is new it is a bright orange color and then it turns brown." What is the coin called? "A penny." Then I would take the penny and put it back on the pile of silver coins and ask her to pick out the penny again...and she could not do it. It had to be by the name of the person on the coin and then it was like hitting her "on" button and she would tell everything she knew about the coin. I am saying this to suggest letting the child look over the coins and tell you with what he/she identifies on each coin and then use that.
I don't really have any ideas since I'm sort of in the same boat. My oldest just turned 7 and is just now understanding money. I just use real coins and we play with them. Now that she's starting to count money we play store almost every day. I cut pics out of a magazine and glued them on an index card and wrote a price on there.
Well, things worked well for my son just because of our names! Nic was five when he learned a Nickle is worth five cents. His sister Dori is worth a Dime (she's 10). Penny he just picked up because it's different... and he's six now and still has trouble with the quarter. But it will come when he starts spending them. That's how my DD learned! I used to stress about things like addresses, phone numbers, etc. All the things they teach in Kindy that my first grader didn't know. But my DD didn't know them very well at that age... and she does now! So it will come even if it isn't on the public schools schedule.
I used the calendar. I started with pennies, adding one for each day up till day 5, and reminding that it is worth one. On day 5, you trade the 5 pennies for one nickel, explaining that it is worth 5. And so on like that. Eventually, we did What is Today Worth?, where you gather coins to show the worth of today's date. Now that Jeannie is 8, I need to start teaching her to make change.
We did it by showing what was different about the coin. Pennies are brownish, quarters are the biggest ones, dimes are the smallest and nickels have the smooth edge. First we had her learn the names of the coins. We didn't worry about the value. Then we worked on the value associated with the names. Finally we put it all together, the name, the value and the coin. To do all three at once was too much. We're now working on what a penny actually means, and how many pennies are in a nickel etc. It seems to take time. Keep working! We're not even really there yet!
We play store with play money...making it a game makes it easier for them to identify the coins, I think. Walmart had a GREAT set a while ago that had very realistic looking coins.
http://www.usmint.gov/kids/ this website has fun games to play like the matching game in your search, you could just type in money, worksheets
http://www.moneyinstructor.com/inp/inpcountcoins.asp http://www.arcytech.org/java/money/learn_coins.html http://www.edutopia.org/money-classroom-store
I know somewhere you can order educational material about coins...... this may be it http://www.dfi.wa.gov/financial-education/educators-elementary.htm