An Unexpected Hit

I was a military child, which meant we moved every few years for most of my childhood. And every time we moved, I would roll up the change that accumulated in what my parents called The Penny Jar. 

Anyone else remember rolling up change in those little paper tubes you would get at the bank? I found it very satisfying as a child to count out the appropriate number of coins and make those neat little rolls that could be exchanged for paper money.

I haven't done that for a lot of years, because our bank in New York had a machine we could dump our change into and it would count it and give us a receipt to be redeemed with the bank teller.

Here, however, we have no such convenient machine. But we do have an old peanut butter jar on A.'s dresser that has been steadily filling with change and needed to be emptied.

So last time I was at the bank, I got some of the coin papers. And last weekend, I sat down and started filling them. I only did one myself before the children started trickling in and asking if they could do it, too.

So they did. And every single one loved it, just as I did as a child.

I'm not a homeschooling parent, but if I were, this would be an excellent school activity. They have to identify all the coins and know what each is worth, plus figure out how many quarters go into a roll that's worth $10. Also, since my method of counting out the coins is making stacks of ten until I get to the amount needed, it's a sort of introduction to multiplication. 

Although the second grader in my house rolled my eyes when I pointed that out. Not so into math, that one.

The one kid who's really into guns loved tamping down the coins with a pencil, pretending he was loading his musket in the Revolution. 

The only downside is that four kids counting out loud and asking for help when they couldn't get their tubes folded over or whatever is VERY chaotic.

But we got it done!

 

The children were all appropriately impressed by how much money was hiding in plain sight in that old peanut butter jar.

So if you, too, have a large collection of change and a bunch of children, go ahead and get some coin wrappers and let them go to town. Free (educational!) entertainment that actually results in money in hand. Doesn't get much better than that.