3rd Grade Educational Coins

Third graders at Varina have been learning about money and multiplication in math (SOL3.8 & 3.2), so today students in Ms. Leo’s class designed their own educational coins and made up multiplication problems about them for their classmates to solve. First we discussed how the U.S. Mint designs new coins to sell and how, if people don’t like the designs, they won’t buy them. There are thousands of unused dollar coins sitting in vaults because no one wants them. I asked the students to guess the most popular coin (surprisingly, it’s the penny). Since they were also learning about the water cycle in science (SOL3.9), I told them to put something educational on their coins from science (water cycle, plant cycle, frog cycle, butterfly cycle, related to the circle shape of coin) or social studies (Greece, Rome, famous Americans, etc). They could either work with a partner or by themselves. Partners divided up the tasks, so one designed the coin using Pixie and the other designed a website about the coin using CheckThis. The website had to persuade people to buy the coin. Then they made a math multiplication word problems to explain how the coins are packaged and shipped out to banks (rolls of coins in boxes). Their sites were published to the classroom page, but you can take a look at them here.