Skip Counting with Coins on the Hundred Grid

Our family is going to be participating in Lemonade Day in our town this Spring, and to that end I've reintroduced the money math unit that we first began some months ago when Willow got interested in coin collecting for a while.

My goal is (taking extra care with pricing, of course) for Willow to be able to do all the math and make all her own change at the girls' lemonade stand--whether or not this goal is realistic, I have no idea!

First step: skip counting by each of the coin denominations, followed immediately by keying the counting to the denomination. In other words, I want both girls to be able to easily skip count by fives, tens, and 25s at least up to 100, to count by hundreds up to at least 1,000, and to recognize that skip counting by fives, say, is the same as counting nickels.

The girls have been creating their own skip counting reference sheets using, of COURSE, our ubiquitous hundred grid. For nickels, for example, one day's schoolwork was simply to count off the fives and color in each five in their hundred grid. The next day's schoolwork (and the next!) was to memorize the fives, until they could recite it easily.

When a girl had her fives down cold, I gave her a new hundred grid, asked her to put a nickel down on each five, and then use the chart as a reference to solve a page of math problems:

The problems are all just iterations of how much a certain number of nickels equals. To solve the problem, the kid can either skip count over that many nickels, or just count over that many nickels, and then move aside that nickel. The number underneath is the correct answer!

Once the kiddos have all the skip counting and coin denominations memorized, I'm going to send them through the math drills in our Kumon money math workbook as well as some fun projects from my Money Math pinboard. And then when Lemonade Day comes around, providing I can convince the children not to price their lemonade at 63 cents or $1.07 or something else that will require a child to do twenty minutes of abacus work for every transaction, I think we may just have it made!

P.S. It's just occurred to me that I should also teach them to count by tens when beginning at 5. AND I should be mixing more subtraction drills into the prep work, especially two-digit subtraction.

Or I could just encourage the girls to price everything they make at one dollar?