Prologue
Who says you can’t make money teaching? Each year I use a token economy as a system to encourage students to help in the classroom with attitude and work, and in the first day of school we make coins out of homemade dough with ¾” PVC to roll stamp them out with. It’s nice to have some textures to press in the dough, too. That’s what I call rolling in the dough! Or, at least, rolling it out.
In preparation you can read “The Story of Money” by Betsy Maestro, which actually can take a couple of hours to get through orally, or you can give a brief history of money from Wikipedia or this nice concise version from PBS. Any of these can also be read or introduced during the making of the money. The idea, though, of working together on a physical task, is that it allows conversation to happen, and we are the people who also teach how to be a person.
Lesson Instructions
(This is not a script. Stray often and innovate. Continue to develop yourself into an intelligent, resourceful person, who thinks on their feet and responds to the situation and people around you. Every lesson you teach is a jazz solo: once you know the chord progression, you improvise a new lesson: teaching is ephemeral art for the moment. A thinking, responsive person is the model we want for our children to learn from; it’s who we want people to be).
I playfully ask the students to pull out their green writing notebooks. Most won’t have one, some might have been sent to school with a notebook, I tell them I meant their other ones. Their green writing notebooks. When someone lets me know that they don’t have one, I tell them they need to buy one from the class store. When one of them says that they don’t have any money and don’t know where the store is I say, “Well we better work on that right away!”. I make frequent intentional and unintentional mistakes, and point them out, and encourage the students to (respectfully) point them out. This is because I once had a class job of “scapegoat” on whom I would pin all my mistakes, because I made fun of the notion that adults don’t make mistakes, but had a little girl whose father had told her that he didn’t make mistakes and was very serious about that. She had a breakdown when I continued to scapegoat students, so now I go the other way, very literal so I don’t do that to anyone else. I hope that is a lesson you can learn from this: say what you mean. I learn lessons in humor and teaching, as long as I listen. I show them the class store, tell them that is where they can buy things from, like class supplies and other items with their class money, which they earn individually from doing class jobs, and collectively as we go down and behavior checklist. Now I tell them to buy their books! They say, “We don’t have any money,” I say, then let’s make some!
Ask the students to gather around you, at a table as where you stand with the materials and measuring tools for purpose of demonstration.
Before I begin I make sure I have everyone’s attention, (there are various techniques), and give this caveat: the game of money is not to collect the most or be the most wealthy, or the collection of material things. I tell them that the game is a way to make ourselves better people, better at doing jobs, and most importantly, being good to each other. I ask if they’ve ever seen a sports celebrity act badly. Then I ask if the point of a game is fun, aren’t they missing the whole point? Like that, I say, the point of our store and our economy isu to have a fun way to do things we need to do anyway, and the game is to be played well.
Demonstrate the measuring and mixing of dry ingredients. A group of four students per mixing batch allows each student to measure and add their ingredient. Tell them that you will come around with the boiling water once each person has measured and added their own ingredient. This is a great opportunity to talk about how the mixing of all different ingredients allow us to create something new. Each of them as people will give something to the class that is unique and critical to the mix of us as a class. The teacher should pour in the boiling water and begin mixing until the temperature is safe to touch for students. After each group has mixed their dough, ask them to break off portions and roll that potion out with their PVC rollers. Once rolled out, have the students stamp out coins with the end of the PVC cylinder, they may need to then poke through the PVC cylinder with the eraser end of a pencil to push the play-dough coin out of the end. They can then texture or inscribe their coin with the sharp end of the pencil, and move them to dry so they can clean up. They should use only ⅓ of the dough they made, the rest is to use for the next project.
When the coins are dry, I spray paint them. This helps to keep them from breaking, while adding some “cool” factor. We also then vote on a name for our type of money, after discussing some names of money from around the world.
Materials
- To make the play-dough: 2 cups of plain flour 4 tablespoons of cream of tartar 2 tablespoons of cooking oil 1 cup salt 2 cups boiling water Optional: food coloring
- For coin forming: ¾ inch PVC or film canisters, or whatever size cylinder you chooser
- For texture stamping: shells, burlap, sanded bark or wood chips, aluminum foil, or anything you and the students brainstorm!
URL for External Curriculum
Lesson Duration
1 hour
Placement
Beginning of year, establishing classroom conventions
Tags
- 3rd grade
- behavior
- classroom management
- economics
- math
Categories
- Addition
- Math
- Social Studies
Standards
- Common Core Math
- National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies
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Other/Alternative Standard(s)
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