Coin-Counting Routine

I love helping kids see mathematical connections between skills that might not seem related at first. Take telling time and counting money, for example. In both, you’re skip counting—starting with one number and then switching to another. When you count coins, you usually group them and skip count by that value (skip count by 25s for quarters, 10s for dimes, and so on). I’ve seen lots of paper-and-pencil strategies for counting coins, but at the end of the day this is really a mental skill. After all, you’re not pulling out pencil and paper in the checkout line!

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A great way to practice this skill is with a routine called Count Around the Circle from the book Number Sense Routines: Building Numerical Literacy Every Day in Grades K-3, by Jessica Shumway. There are many applications for this routine, but I adapted it for counting coins.

So here’s how it goes. Show the nickel card and students go around the circle counting by 5s. At some point in the circle, switch the card to the penny card and then the next student switches over to counting by 1s. I would recommend starting slowly with the coins—maybe counting by 5s (nickels) and then switching to 1s (pennies)—and gradually building up over time to switch from quarters to dimes to nickels and pennies.

You could also do this activity in a small group. Lay the cards in front of you in order from quarters down to nickels (assuming students are using all coins). Point to the coin you want them to start counting by. For example, point to the dime and they start counting by 10s. When you point to the nickel, they switch to counting by 5s, etc. Sometimes, go directly from dimes to pennies.

Telling time uses the same skill. We typically count by 5s and then switch over to counting by 1s. Or, we use a benchmark time of, say, 30 minutes, and then count by 5s and 1s.

Click here to grab your own copy of the coin cards.