Memories and Development

Yesterday in class I took out a paper dollar, a fifty cent piece, a quarter, a dime and a nickle. I told the kids that it was money. They all knew that. I asked what the pieces were of my group of four and fives. Some knew; some didn't. I told them it was time to know, and they all agreed that would be nice to be able to understand about money.

I tried to explain that a penny was not the same thing as a dollar. That there were 100 of these little copper spots in every dollar bill. "Where are they?" asked Daymon looking carefully at the bill. "Inside or outside? asked another.

"Well, if you went to the store, and you wanted to buy a candy bar that cost $1.00, and you handed the man the penny instead, he would laugh at you and tell you to go get some more pennies."

"That's not nice," chirped someone under their breath.

"Let's look at it from another point of view. If I handed you a chocolate chip, and I handed you a candy bar, who has more?"

"I don't like chocolate," said Abby.

"Not the point. If you got just that much and someone got a big candy bar, it's not the same thing, is it?"

"No."

"OK," I had them; I was sure. " So if I gave Dawson a penny and I gave Taylor a dollar, Taylor would have more, right?"

They were blank as unplugged TV. "Let's just listen and figure this out. Just like the abacus with ten beads on every line, there is a value or an amount, or a total or a whole count of beads on the abacus. How many beads are there all together?"

"A hundred."

The dollar is just like the abacus. There are a hundred pennies in the dollar.

"Where, Miss Judy?"

"Let's look at a nickle."

When we finish with money, we'll start on time.

When my husband picked me up from school in our car that's worth about a dollar, I thought about that class. I told my husband about it, and he said there is where the world has really changed. Kids don't walk down the street to buy penny candy anymore, so they learn a lot later the value of money. "A soda was about ten cents," he remarked, "Candy was about a nickle, and if you had a quarter, you could get a really nice fountain drink."

Ten years later, I remember climbing under the boardwalk to find dropped nickles and dimes. We used this money to buy candy. Candy money was not something we generally had. Candy was something that was a pretty big treat. You got candy on holidays like Halloween, Easter and Christmas.

This week in school, we've worked hard on building words with sounds we've learned. We are currently working with the air sound "a" and adding the mouth or consonant sounds to each side of the "a" and sounding the word out. For every word made, a child receives a penny in a box. When he gets to $1.00, he can take the pennies home. The whole idea is to encourage children to make words and read them. I wonder if it would have gone faster years ago.