Y’all, I’m having some serious math issues in our homeschool this week.
Near the end of last school year, I got so tired of needing coins that I didn’t have enough of that I ordered two sets of play coins.
Unfortunately, they didn’t come with enough to meet our math needs this year and it seems that I need to place another order.
Yesterday morning as I was getting our math lessons ready to go, I noticed in the “needed” materials section that I needed 54 pennies to teach our third grade math lesson on regrouping tens.
I counted out every play penny we had and came up with exactly 52 pennies.
Ugh!!!
Two short…
I voiced this frustration to my husband when he called and he found it quite funny. Then, brilliant man that he is, he advised me to look in the car.
Sure enough, I was able to round up the needed two pennies and a few more (just in case).
We were able to have our math lesson and all was well in the world.
That is until I began preparing for today’s math lesson this morning (yes, I do realize that I need to be more on top of this math planning) and realized that it would require 90 pennies. We were doing a lesson on multiplying by 10 and needed 9 cups filled with ten pennies.
Guess what…if I only scrounged 52 pennies together yesterday by searching the nooks and crannies of our car, there was no way I would have 90 pennies for today’s lesson.
I began searching for a solution and found it on our kitchen counter and a jar of M&Ms.
I knew we had way more than ninety M&Ms in that jar…yay for my husband’s M&M addiction!!!
I was able to fill 9 cups with the required 10 M&Ms in each and our math lesson was a success today.
Now, I’m off to order some more play coins and check tomorrow’s math lesson to see what I may face.
Shanna says
Instead of using hard-earned money to buy play money, just use real money!! Seriously, I got so tired of this I had Brad bring home $10 in change to my exact specifications. 🙂 Never had another problem. Still keep it on the bookshelf and we haven’t raided it for Sonic Happy Hour yet!
Monica says
You’re right, I really should just go to the bank and get some read money to use. That’s what we were using last year until I got tired of not having enough of what we needed on hand. I need to just figure out exactly what we’ll need and do it. But, then that would require me to actually go out to a bank or something…