"It's three 1 dollars!"
Feb 17, 2025My daughter Janelle (age 5, in Kindergarten) asked for 3 dollars to buy a candy-gram to for a student council fundraiser.
I agreed, and gave Janelle three one-dollar bills to put in her backpack. She looked at the bills and exclaimed “It’s three one dollars!”
I was thrilled with this reaction, and here’s why: Janelle has recognized the basic unit of our money system. Thinking of one dollar as one whole is the basis for all kinds of mathematical reasoning with money and is an example of unitizing.
What is unitizing?
Unitizing - the concept that a group of items can simultaneously be described as a number of smaller items and as one group.
This is a foundation for much of the mathematics that students encounter during their elementary years.
This moment made me realize I want to start giving Janelle experience handling money and reasoning about the different units that bills and coins represent. She has a piggy bank that she loves putting coins into, but hasn’t yet learned the different values of each or how they relate to one dollar.
Janelle received some larger bills for the holidays, and I’m going to change them out for 1 dollar bills before we talk about what she wants to do with the money. I think this will help her:
- build a sense of the magnitude of the money she actually has
- relate that amount to prices of things she sees at stores
- begin to practice exchanging one dollar bills for other equivalent amounts of money
- think about the amounts she wants to split the total into and put into the different parts of this this kids' savings bank
When I was a middle school teacher, I was able to use a money context to teach students to mentally calculate with fractions, no procedures or common denominators necessary. For example:
- A dime is 10 cents or 1/10 of a dollar
- Two quarters is 50 cents or 1/2 of a dollar, or 5/10 of a dollar
- Therefore 1/10 + 1/2 = 6/10
Students learned to think of certain fractions in terms of coins and by doing so developed the ability to flexibly think about numbers in different formats. However, many of our children don’t get much experience with physical money in our age of credit card and digital transactions.
I hope this demonstrates that giving our children experience with physical money from an early age has the potential to pay dividends in all kinds of ways as they grow.
Do you have your young child handle money at all? Consider starting if you haven't yet!
