Working with Money – Year 3/4

Summary:

This lesson provides students with the opportunity to develop money skills through a real world learning context. This lesson was designed for a year 3/4 composite class,has been tested and worked well with high student engagement.

Australian Curriculum Links:

Year 3:

  • Represent money values in multiple ways and count the change required for simple transactions to the nearest five cents (ACMNA059)

Year 4:

  • Solve problems involving purchases and the calculation of change to the nearest five cents with and without digital technologies (ACMNA080)

Lesson Sequence:

Introduction/Warm up:

  • Provide each student with a ‘money wallet’ (small bag with a zipper or a zip lock bag with play money).
  • Write an amount of money on the whiteboard. E.g. $1.00/1 dollar.
  • Ask students to read the amount of money and use their play money to show one way of representing this amount of money.
  • Ask student to represent the same amount of money in a different way. Use questions to help them such as ‘if you didn’t have any gold coins how else could you represent this amount of money?’
  • As a class discuss the multiple ways of representing $1.00/1 dollar. Using your copy of the play money glue tac it to the whiteboard or show it on the smartboard so students can see the different ways an amount of money can be represented.
  • Repeat with other money amounts.

Body:

  • Inform students that they will be going ‘shopping’ with their money wallets.
  • Each student takes a number of items from the ‘shop’ (students may begin with 1 item if they are having difficulty adding money amounts together).
  • Using their items students fill out the ‘items purchased and their price’, ‘total cost of items’, ‘money paid’ and ‘how much change will you receive?’ on the ‘Let’s go shopping’ worksheet.
  • Students take their items, money wallet and their ‘Let’s go shopping’ worksheet to the cashier (may be another student or the teacher). The cashier checks the student has filled in the necessary areas of the worksheet. The student pays for their items and sees how much change they receive and writes it under the ‘change received’ section ofthe ‘Let’s go shopping’ worksheet. Did they calculate the change correctly?
  • Students may then go back and ‘buy’ more items.

Conclusion:

  • Class discussion about what students learnt from this learning experience.

Assessment:

  • Annotation of students ‘Let’s go shopping’ worksheets.
  • Checklist recording students’ ability to represent an amount of money in multiple ways.
  • Anecdotal notes of students recorded during observation, discussion and activities.

Resources:

  • Whiteboard
  • Whiteboard markers
  • Smartboard
  • ‘Money wallet’ (small bag with a zipper or a zip lock bag with play money)
  • Play money (cut out and laminate)
  • ‘Shop’ with various items (e.g. milk carton, tissue box, cereal boxes, etc)
  • Price tags (to stick on the items in the ‘shop’)
  • ‘Let’s go shopping’ worksheet
  • Pencils