Penny, Nickle, Dime and Quarter

Oh me oh my.

School is at my house this week. I am in my final countdown for hosting school. I have Thursday and then May 24 and 26. Normally, my friends, I would wax poetic about how I can't believe my little boy is done with 3yo preschool and going to 4yo preschool next year. And so on and so forth.

But people, I am tired. We started our little version of school last April. We absolutely took breaks, but still. In a typical schedule preschool they have 72 days of school. When we are done, we will have had 85. That's pretty good. But tiring.

Anyway, today we learned about Money. Nothing too fancy but my goal was to have them name the President on each of the four main coins, the name of the coin and it's value. We are going to fall a little short on that. I will be happy if by week's end we can name the coins. Well, C is actually very good at it. Nickle, Penny and Quarter he's got down. He has a little trouble with Franklin Roosevelt. But I hope to get the girls up to speed about the names of the coins.

We read The Coin Counting Book.

For math we did coin patterns. Again, C breezed through this one with no problem but the girls had trouble distinguishing between the three silver coins. 

I had assigned homework. I gave each kid a "dirty" penny to give a bath/wash with the dishes and try to clean it. Obviously soap and water doesn't work. So for science we tried to clean pennies with lots of different things: milk, water, vinegar/salt, ketchup, cocktail sauce, Worcestershire sauce, garlic lemon marinade and salsa. The kids were able to slather on the things they thought would work to get them clean. 

After some time we rinsed them off. Water, milk and Worcestershire were the only ones that didn't work. Vinegar/salt, ketchup and the marinade did the best. I should note that I think some of the pennies suffered from being in a condiment for too long and went past shiny and back to black. But the kids didn't care.

To have some gross motor play I set up a coin toss similar to lawn darts. They also had coin rubbing for craft and a coin filled sensory bin. I didn't take any pictures because I was busy keeping things under control. 

Thursday we have a fun day planned of coin stacking and sorting, painting banks (not piggy shaped because those were like $6 each and so I bought little boxes for $.99 and I am cutting slits in the top, reading a story about shopping, writing the names of the money, role playing with shopping and then we are going on a field trip to Burger King for sundaes and then playing in the play place. This will be awesome because Husband is going to be home to help me and then he is staying with M during the field trip.