My 5 year old daughter is having her first book fair at school. She is going to get $20 to spend at the book fair and she is really excited about it. The only problem is, she doesn’t quite know what all adds up to $20, so we have tried to practice at home.

We had some play money and a register set up so she should go and pick some pretend books from our bookshelf and buy them with the $20. I tried to set up all the money in a pyramid before the game started to show her that $20 is equal to 2x $10 bills, which is equal to 4x $5 bills, which is equal to 20x $1 bills. I was hoping that visualizing the concept would help her understand it and even though I think it helped, she didn’t quite know how to grasp it when I was mixing bills together to make $20.

The game still continued and she started out with $20. She picked a book and I told her how much it was and gave her back her change. She then picked another book and the game continued. Once she “ran out of money” and wanted to start over, I gave her the $20 and put the books back. We played a few rounds of this and the single book consecutive transactions worked well.

When we started to buy books in a bundle, that’s when things were a bit more difficult. I think adding bigger numbers together higher than $10 with some smaller numbers were hard to consistently get right and I suggested to my wife that maybe we should give our daughter 20x $1 bills so she could just count out how much money she had and set it aside for the books that she wants. My wife agreed and we will see how this all goes later this week!