Money and denominations

Just a quick little note. The young one and I were playing Dino Store for a bit this morning and I could see it was winding down. So I came up with what I thought might be a quick little one-off activity/game involving coins. I laid out pairs of groups of coins side by side, and the goal was for her to figure out which group had more money. …

It worked well and we did a few rounds of it, but it really took off when I suggested that she make the groups and I figure out which had more money. She worked diligently to count out and add up piles, enjoining me to not look and to stay out while she did so. She tried to come up with "tricky" ones (ie equal piles with different coins), and we had discussions of counting by 5s, 10s, and even 25s and 50s. We did many more rounds of it and only stopped because the neighbor boys wanted to play outside. Quite a successful operation all in all, so I thought I'd share.