Teaching Money With Technology

We are just finishing up our math unit on money.  I teach grade 2 math, so the expectations were that students would be able to count coins up to one dollar.  We had to start right from the beginning with money.  Many of my students were unable to name the coins and tell me what they were worth.  In this blog post, I am going to highlight some of the activities we partook in over past couple of weeks. Small group instruction is key in my math classroom, so I try to give activities that I model first, then students can work independently while I work with the students that need the extra help.

Like I said before, some of my students couldn't name the coins and others knew their value.  I decided to have the students create a money book on the iPads using the book creator app.  Some students made a book about each coin while others were given set amounts that they needed to show in their books.  They also needed to record their voice and talk about each page, whether it be explaining the coins and how much they are worth or counting the coins that represent a certain amount.  Here are three examples from three different books.

Another activity students participated in was a money Math Station that I used last year when I taught grade 2 math.  For my students that were not ready to make a dollar four ways, we used sticky notes to cover the amount and wrote in a different amount that were challenging for them at their level.

App Needed - Draw & Tell

This one might be a bit confusing at first.  Here is a video of one of my students completing this math station:

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My students also created money questions to share on our class Twitter feed for other students to answer.  Here is an example from one of my student's blogs here.

Instead of giving my students a written test at the end of our unit.  I had them show their learning using a content creation app.  I think is a far superior way of seeing and hearing what your students can do rather than a paper pencil task!  I love the following example because my student makes a mistake on the second slide and you can hear him thinking about what he is doing and fixes it!

Here is the instruction sheet my students received:

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What are some ways that you teach money in your classroom?