Money maths

Honestly, it's been a really tough day today.

I think it's only because I stayed up too late last night and I'm plain old tired.

When I'm tired, I don't have the patience to jolly everyone along and without a sense of humour, things get grumpy.

Sebastian was clingy and cross all morning. I kept trying to feed him snacks but when that didn't work, I put him into his cot. He cried for ages and then a visitor called in and I relented and got him up again.

Despite all this, we managed some sort of sketchy violin practice this morning (I keep reminding myself that the violin teacher is pleased if Francesca just practises holding the violin and bow - it was slightly better than that)

Elizabeth and Sebastian watched the Rhyme Rocket, which Francesca was meant to see as well but she was so slow to get going with her practice that she missed it. Sulking ensued.

Eventually... eventually, we got onto maths.

I gave the girls coins to look at and we discussed their relative values and put out caps (from Ella's Kitchen pouches) to represent how many pennies each coin was worth.

Then we did rubbings of the coins - both sides, and labelled them with 1p, 2p etc.

They had to practise writing £ on the whiteboards first, before they were confident to label their £1 and £2 coins.

Francesca was great at doing £ signs.

Sebastian's need a little more work(!)

Elizabeth had some dots to trace over and made a good job of it. (Yes, she has an injury under her nose. How does one manage to land on that part of the face?!)

Here are the caps, laid out to show the values of the coins:

And here's Francesca's page of coin rubbings. It's not as organised as I had demonstrated (see top corner!) so it wasn't clear which coin was which. I'd like to encourage her to organise her work better, but it'll come. At least she experienced the coins and learnt that they have different values.

Because Francesca's work was so disordered, I produced a set of rubbings for her to label, as an easier reference.

After that, I started to talk about adding together different coins but we'd already spent 40 minutes on the task and their concentration was waning so I dropped that line of enquiry. We'll come back to it another day. I'm aiming for Francesca to be able to count how much money she has in her money box on Friday. (And be ready for the Year 2 New Heinemann Maths book on money by the time it arrives in the post).