Teaching Tool Tuesday - Mad About Money Lapbook is Done!!!

Noah's year-end evaluation is only weeks away, and I'm already feeling unprepared. Although we intend to continue with school through the summer, there are a few things I'd like to get wrapped up before the official end to second grade . . . for example, the Mad About Money lapbook that's been dragging on all school year.

I thought that working on the lapbook one section at a time would be easier than making myself crazy by doing it all at once (I'm guessing that I spend between 60 and 80 hours on each one). It worked for a while, but somehow I lost my momentum during my mid-year "scale back" plan.

Today, I called a teacher work day and wrapped it up. After art class at the museum this morning, my mom picked the kids up for a movie and dropped them off at home to Jim mid-afternoon. Meanwhile, I worked for about six hours straight at my favorite cafe with an endless supply of herbal tea to keep me going!

I'm so happy with how it turned out, and we'll be completing ours this week. The full (free!) download will be coming soon!!!

Teaching Tool Tuesday - Mad About Money Week 2 Curriculum / Lapbook Now Available

Don’t tell, but my wish lists at Lakeshore Learning and Amazon are much longer than the one I have at Endless.com. Honestly, I’m a complete sucker for books and educational games, software and toys. But this past year I’ve honed my ability to discern which tools will be fun once or twice and which ones we'll use over and over . . . and I’ll be sharing our favorites with you every Tuesday. 

Week 2 of our Mad About Money unit study at co-op was delayed a bit due to my anniversary weekend. We finally covered "Keep the Change" this past week, so I'm sharing the curriculum and lapbook pages on the blog. 

The curriculum includes the history of coins, including the problems with early coins in the United States. It moves on to cover the denominations of modern coins, how they are made and the state quarter program, with experiments on coin flip probability and cleaning pennies.

The corresponding lapbook pages include a Venn diagram comparing the original and current U.S. coins, a map of U.S. Mint locations, details on your state quarter and a "Decoding Coins" activity.

Both the lesson plan and lapbook template for Week 1 are already up on the blog and since I'll be teaching Week 3 on Thursday, look for those soon as well!

As always, I'd love to hear from anyone who uses the curriculum and see pictures of your lapbooks over on the Homeschooling in Heels Facebook page! 

 

Mad About Money Lapbook is Underway!

Here's the first sneak preview from the Mad About Money lapbook that is finally underway.

This unit will cover both the history of money and the basics of personal finance. My two main resources are The Everything Kids Money Book, a wonderful resource I stumbled upon at Barnes and Noble, and Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace, Jr. curriculum.

I'm going to be releasing this one in phases as I complete our bi-weekly lesson plan for co-op, so each section of the lapbook will include a complete lesson plan to go with it. I just finished Week 1: The Story of Money, but my co-op kids get to see it first. I'll be sure to post it after class on Thursday!