Hi, check out our grocery corner! We have very limited classroom space so it had to be mounted on the back wall. I used my daughter’s old Monopoly dollars and placed them into separately labelled Zip-lock bags at the base of the station. Real coins are on the right. You can use more realistic toy money like this one here from Educational Insights.

First, I set up the store are area on the wall, if you have more classroom space and funding you can use actual goods like popular snacks or classroom stationery as the goods that will be for sale that is laid out on shelves.  Commercially available sets like this one can work too. I appointed myself as the cashier and did a role play of a purchase with one of my students. After this I let other students come and ‘buy’ things from me (as the cashier) but I gave them enough dollars and cents to be able to pay with exact money. After some practice with this, we moved on to having them buy more than one items at a time. I gave them blank bill templates to list and add the price of their goods for themselves. The final stage was to let them buy things using a larger dollar value and letting them subtract their totals from the dollar amount that they were paying with to calculate the change.

For each new concept, I did a role play, and had the templates ready and showed them how to write them up. Even though I did not use calculators (they are banned at my school) I would recommend using them because I think that the goal of the exercise it to understand the flow of the steps and not necessarily the skills that are taught for addition and subtraction (during that exercise).

I would also recommend a cash register toy like this one below.

We have done a lot of addition and subtraction prior to moving on to this unit. We also studied dollars and cents and equivalences in money before to starting the store. Below are some links to useful books that are all about dollars and cents for kids.

From my joke book series, this book of Funny Money Jokes for kids is filled with jokes jokes about dollars and cents, going to the bank, and counting money. It’s a fun way to keep kids interested in the topic of money. For Grades 2 to 6.

Below are books for Grades 1 to 3:

Thanks for reading!