Magnetic Money Piggie

This is a great way to teach place value, coins, and counting to 100.

This shows Day 131:   1 dollar, 3 dimes, & 1 penny.

I use a metal pig.  Yes, a metal pig!


(If you don't have one, just use a cookie sheet and draw a pig with a Sharpie or glue a graphic of a pig to the cookie sheet.  See the picture at the end of this post.)

Add small, round magnets to 10 pennies and 10 dimes.

With a Sharpie, I drew 10 dots at the top of the pig and 10 dots on his snout.
I placed the 10 pennies on the dots on the top of the pig and 10 dimes on the dots on his snout.

I wrote the numbers 1-9 up both legs of the pig, I wrote 100 on his ear, and placed a paper clip on his ear.

Here is a different view for you.  

On Day 1 we placed one penny on the leg to the far right of the pig as we were looking at it.
We continued to add a penny each day.
When we got to Day 10 there wasn't enough room for the 10th penny, so we traded all 10 pennies for a dime and placed a dime on the pig's leg to the left.  The leg on the right didn't have anything on it now.
So, we had one group of 10 (the dime) and nothing in the one's column.

We continues to add pennies and cashed them in for dimes each time we accumulated 10 pennies.
When we had 10 dimes, there wasn't enough room for the 10th dime, so we cashed all 10 of the dimes in for a dollar bill which we clipped to his ear.

I also display the number of school days with number cards.  Here is a Freebie:  You can grab our "Perfect Number Cards" here.    These cards have the non-pointy four and the straight nine.

If you want to show the date in coins, you can use this model:

It was the 22nd of themonth.  We displayed 22 cents and we also showed 2:00.