Money skills are an important aspect to independent living. Not only do students have to be able to identify types of money and their values, or how to budget, but also all of the hand and social skills that come with handling money. It’s one thing to do worksheets that have word problems involving money, but being able to transfer those skills in the community is a whole other skill to master. Here are some ideas to practice these functional skills in the classroom to prepare your students for the community and beyond!
Digital Activities, File Folders, Task Cards > Worksheets
I am not a huge fan of worksheets, just because a lot of times worksheets are not very motivating for my students (and they kill trees), but I do use them from time to time. It depends on the student, but I’m a huge fan of digital activities and task cards, because these are visually engaging. And usually they provide a limited number of answer fields (multiple-choice), which most of my students need. They are accessible to students that are not able to write. Digital activities are a great way to allow students to either circle the answer, or they can touch/point to it.
Digital activities are also accessible to those who need audio. So for digital activities, you might have the question read to them, or what the answer choices are, if it’s reading comprehension, you need the whole thing read to them. The other thing that I like is that students can concentrate on one question at a time. So when you’re using a task card, it’s like having one question and one multiple-choice set of answers right there in front of you. Sometimes worksheets can be overwhelming because you have, five, six, 20 different questions on one sheet. So I like that we’re able to just focus on one question at a time.
Digital activities and task cards and file folders make for great independent work centers or small group lessons, you’re able to do that with worksheets also, but if you haven’t already hopped onto the digital activities, these are great for distance learning or back in the classroom. Check out this blog post on how to use digital activities in the classroom.
Need adapted resources for teaching money skills? Check these out:
Money & Math Digital Activities (multiple choice)
Digital Task Boxes (Drag & Drop)
Social Narratives (Social Stories)
Why do I use these? They’re visual, and they teach direct social skills instruction that is beneficial to students with special needs or autism. A lot of the times I might do a social story that has to do with money, names and values, you know, the basics about money. And then next we can move on to talking about banking terms, what the banking terms mean, and then how we’re going to apply those in the community or what that means as far as when you’re working in earning money, like how that all correlates.
So putting it into a social story or a social narrative is a helpful way to help your students understand how and why. Some other ideas that you can use are steps to making a transaction. This is a perfect social narrative that you can write, um, how to budget, or how to use a debit card. Anything that needs requires a who, what, where, when, why, or step-by-step social stories are perfect for that.
Use Real Cash (Or fake cash that looks real)
Use actual cash when possible, I think the more realistic it is, the better, it’s easier for the students to transfer that knowledge. If you don’t feel comfortable using real cash with some activities, you can use fake cash. And I’ve found some pretty realistic looking cash on Amazon (affiliate link) CLICK HERE. Try and steer away from monopoly money or the “fake cash” that does not look anything like the real thing because it can be confusing for the student and harder for them to transfer that knowledge to the real thing.
An activity that I like to do, especially if still doing virtual or hybrid learning is you can ask the students to bring a wallet or different amounts of bills and coins with them to the live session. Or if you’re doing this in class, you would just have all of that readily available for them. Some simple ideas for activities using real cash:
- Money match
- Counting
- Name identification
- Value identification
- Pay for an item
- Next Dollar Up
- Which is more/less
How to implement: So you’ll hold up the $5 bill for instance, then all of the students have a $1 bill, a $5 bill, maybe some quarters, you know, all the different coins or one of each thing. Then they have to find which one matches to the one that you’re holding up, and you can go through each one. Another thing you can do is counting all the different values. So they have to hand you either a $5 bill or hand you five, $1 bills, just a bunch of different variations you can work on with that. You can work on name identification, so maybe you’ll hold up the $5 bill or a quarter.
On-Campus/Classroom Jobs
I like to have my students fill out timesheets when they complete a classroom or an on-campus job. That way they are learning that their work is equating to a reward or a paycheck, much like they would experience once they are in the adult world or in their career world. So students can earn money or they can earn points towards, the minutes or hours that they worked. It depends on what type of reward system you want to set up in your classroom. Using actual money can get kind of expensive, but I like lower amounts like 25 cents or something along those lines, that’ll go towards like a snack bar or like a little reward store that they can redeem those things.
This would also provide another opportunity for students to learn how to read analog and digital clocks for when they are, clocking in or clocking out and writing that time down on their timesheet. It also gives them the opportunity to learn to count and add up their hours. So that way they can see, Hey, I worked one hour on Monday, I worked one hour on Wednesday, and I worked one hour on Friday, so I worked a total of three hours this week and that’s going to get me this reward. Having them fill out timesheets is a great way for basic calculations of paychecks. Check out this simplified timesheet system for your classroom.
Token Economy
Token economy is also a great way to work on “earning” money. So I don’t use too much token economy in the adult transition world just because we usually try and fade out of a token economy, but it’s okay if you’re still using it. And if we are using it, I try and make it functional. I try and incorporate money into it instead of earning stars or whatever it might be, but you know your students, so you have to choose something that’s going to work for them, especially when it comes to compliance. But if you can, try and incorporate money. You can simply Velcro fake coins, or you can actually do real coins, which would be even better. That way the student can see it’s a real nickel or a real dime or whatever you choose to use.
Students can work for a prize box or reward store. You can create a visual menu as a reminder to students of what they are working for. This menu can consist of simple pricing on it (higher prices for more value rewards). For example, they can earn a coloring page that you set at a dollar’s worth of coins depending on how fast your student needs to be reinforced throughout the day. Another thing I like to do is on Fridays, we go off campus and we go to the dollar tree so they can work towards earning something at the dollar tree that they can purchase. And then from there, we’re using more money skills to make that purchase. So it’s a win, win all around.
Classroom Grocery Store
There’s so many different activities that you can get out of having a classroom grocery store. So what I’ve done is I’ll save up old cans and old boxes. And if you need help, you can ask your staff, or you can ask other teachers or even the parents of your students to send in old packages, after they’re done using them, as long as they’re not like dirty. So be careful about some of the jars. You want to make sure you clean them out pretty well. You can use like a small bookshelf or whatever you have space for that has shelves. Put price tags on each item and make sure to give them different prices so you can do comparison shopping skills also. You can find these premade price stickers CLICK HERE on Amazon (affiliate link).
They’re great because they have all of the basics of the money that we’re using. So nothing too complicated, it’s all just $1, 25 cents, 75 cents, 50 cents. There’s $5, $10. So these are all the basic money skills we’re trying to target. If you want to use more accurate pricing, you could print out little tags and put down on there, this one’s $4.67 or $3.29, that way you can practice the dollar up method with some of those higher-level price tags. Here are some of the skills you can work on:
- mock transaction scenarios
- item & price identification
- recognizing items “on sale”
- simple money math subtracting “on sale” price
- next dollar up method
- coupons
- comparison shopping
- Recipe items (shopping list).
No Room for a Grocery Store? No Problem…Use an Interactive Bulletin Board
I’m not a huge fan of decorating bulletin boards. So for me, if I can make it functional, perfect. The nice part about interactive bulletin boards is they don’t take up too much space, it gets students up and moving, and you can switch these out if you want to do like a department store theme or a hardware store theme, grocery store. And that way it’s changing it up all the time.
Check out interactive bulletin boards here.
Student Businesses
This is an awesome way to practice so many different skills, as well as help fundraise money for your classroom. That way you can use money towards field trips, or you can use money towards a cooking lesson and so on. So some of the money skills that are covered when you are doing a student business is students can figure out the product costs and pricing an item to make a profit. They’re also adding prices if selling multiple products they are getting hands-on money handling when they are selling their items to customers. And they’re working on also giving change back to the customers. If the customer gives them a dollar over amount, they can also practice budgeting money towards more supplies or what they’re going to spend that money on.
Find out more on how to get a student business started:
Cooking Lessons
Your first thought is, okay, what does cooking have to do with money? But as I had said earlier, when you’re doing these fundraising efforts, or you’re dealing with money to raise for cooking lessons or field trips, this is how you’re going to be practicing your money and skills. So I know a lot of teachers do the cooking lessons, and sometimes they’ll go and get the supplies themselves, but you should make a community-based instruction lesson out of it. It’s an opportunity to go off-campus and then you get to practice skills of going shopping. So after you go over a recipe in your lesson, you can make a list of the items needed for the recipe.
If you are unable to go off campus, utilize your free weekly circular store ads. Then there’s a lot of stores that also have online shopping as well. Check out this shopping list activity here.
Secret Santa/Gift Exchange
Here’s a great activity for around the holidays. This is a dollar store secret Santa, or if you want to call it the secret snowflake, whatever you want to call it, I have a freebie for you (head to the blog link right below to download this freebie). This is a great way to cover basic money skills. And on top of that, the students get to experience the gift of giving. To read more about this activity and to download the freebie, check out this blog post: Dollar Store Secret Santa Gift Exchange
BINGO
Bingo is one of my favorite things to do, and yes, I have adults, but we still play bingo. I think it’s a great way to practice names, values, vocabulary, whatever it is because you’re asking the student to basically match something. Check out these money bingo games here.
Scavenger Hunts
Another great community-based instruction activity would be a scavenger hunt. So this would be something that you can do if you don’t feel like spending any money, or you can do it with a recipe. When you’re doing a cooking lesson, it’s similar to a shopping list, but without the spending. So you’ll give students a list of groceries to find the prices for, and they can go throughout the store, looking for those items and finding the price. If you want to make it a little bit tougher, you can ask them to find the price that was the least expensive, or you can find the price that was the most expensive. You can give students a budget and then have them pick out brands and items that they like that are within their budget. Check out these grocery store scavenger hunt activities & worksheets.
Task Boxes
These are a great way to get students using money (or fake money) hands-on, or if you do them digitally, it is still a great way to get students using money in a functional way. You can set up a variety of task boxes that include:
- task cards,
- sorting coins
- sorting bills
- placing money in a cash register in the correct spot
- clipping the correct amount of cash to the price tag
- clipping the correct amount of cash to the store ad (cut and laminate prices from a store ad, students will use the next dollar up method)
Need adapted task box resources for teaching money skills? Check these out:
Money Digital Task Boxes (Drag & Drop)
Thanks for reading!
