Thank you for returning your Lenten Cans. The children have been working hard to sort and count the coins inside. To sort the coins, we observed their color, dividing them into silver and copper.
This week we began to count the copper pennies. To keep track while counting, your child used a "ten frame." The child puts a penny in each square to reach ten. Some children want to count every time to check that they have ten pennies; others retain the number and know that it will be the same.
Once a child has ten pennies, she puts them into a small cup. At this point, we start counting by tens - ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty. It takes five cups of ten pennies to reach the fifty pennies necessary to fill a coin roll. As the children race against each other to see who can fill the coin roll fastest, they start making calculations. "If I've filled three cups, how many more cups do I need to fill?" To count the individual pennies they pick up one at a time, but to fill the coin roll faster they can move several at once.
This is real world work and the children find great satisfaction in accomplishing their goal. Some children asked when they would take the pennies home so we talked about how this is the money we collected in our Lenten cans. Thank you for your generosity and servant hearts towards the refugees in our neighborhood, Welcome Home.
