Goal: Keep track of the total in dollars while collecting pennies for a good cause
Level: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Group size: Any Time: 20 minutes or more over a month
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Materials: Jar for collecting pennies Envelopes or penny rolls Paper and pencils Prerequisites: Familiarity with dollars and cents |
Choose a charity with the group, and explain that children will raise money by collecting pennies. Put the penny jar in a prominent place.
Children make posters and place them around the center reminding everyone to donate pennies by a certain date.
Record predictions for questions such as:
How full will the jar be in a week? How much will that be—about $1? $10? $100?
If everyone gives a penny a day, about how much will we have at the end of the week? at the end of a month?
2. Collect and keep track
Children count the pennies weekly. Put 50 in penny rolls or 100 in envelopes marked $1.00. Extras go in an envelope marked with the number of pennies.
Children record the amount of money collected during the week and the total.
3. Donate
After a month or more, send in the total to the charity.
Variations
Collect $100 (Grades 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
Children collect donations until they reach a certain total. They predict how long it will take to reach the total, given the amount they collect the first week.
Where Does the Money Go? (Grades 5, 6, 7)
Children investigate what their donations will buy. For instance, if a vaccine costs 75 cents, how many vaccinations can they fund?
Fundraiser (Grades 5, 6, 7)
Children plan and hold a fund-raising event, such as a bake sale, car wash, or walk-a-thon, and donate the profits to charity.
Books and Other Resources
Book ideas to come!
Converting from pennies to dollars
Converting pennies to dollars requires keeping track of 100 items. When counting, it’s easy to be off by a penny or two. To help children stay organized, suggest they group pennies in tens as they count.
When children work with funds they care about—their own money or money they’ve collected for a good cause—they’re motivated to work carefully and to make sure their answers are correct. Encourage them to explain their thinking and learn from one another as they work with tens and hundreds.
ConnectionsMoney computations, mental math, and calculators
Before using a calculator for money calculations, it’s a good idea to make a ballpark estimate of the answer so you’ll know if the answer you get seems way off. It’s also important to make sure you keep track of the zeros and decimal points. Calculators are unlikely to make mistakes, but people often make mistakes when using them It’s easy to enter the wrong digit, press the wrong computation key, put in an extra 0, or forget a decimal point.
Suppose you earn $126.43 each week after tax and you want to figure out how much you’ll have after 5 weeks. If you type in 12643 x 5—forgetting the decimal point—your answer will be way too large.
©2008 TERC, Cambridge, MA. All rights reserved.
