For Teachers

Money Activities & Games for Kindergarteners

Here are fun and educational money activities and games you can play with your Kindergarten students.

teacher-kindergarten

As a kindergarten teacher or homeschooler, you want the absolute best for your young students to make sure they get off to a good financial start. During the year, they will get a solid idea of what money is, what it looks like, and the different values of our currency. You can cover concepts like wants and needs, scarcity, choice, and goods and services with your curriculum and standards-based lesson plans. If you are searching for the ideal instructional materials for your students, check out the kindergarten money lesson plans page to download all the lesson plans you need for your kindergarteners!

Sometimes, kids simply want to have fun, and the good news is there are a ton of money activities and games out there for them to practice their skills and play. Take a look at these fun kindergarten money games and hands-on activities, and you’ll soon have your scholars on the path to financial success.

Games

When kids play, they learn, and there are many engaging games you can use to reinforce your lessons. You will find many activities and interactive websites online to keep your kids sharp and curious about money. Let’s take a peek at some of the best games that you can find with a few clicks of your mouse.

Coin Value Puzzles

You can download these puzzles, laminate them, and cut them out for individual students. These puzzles include coin counting activities, where you have your young scholars find different ways to come to the exact totals or identify both the “heads” and “tails” sides of various coins. These puzzles are excellent for building foundational money skills for your students, helping them see values, and identifying the characteristics of different currencies.

Coin Value Puzzles

Counting Money with Caterpillars

Your students practice counting money with fun and interesting caterpillar shapes using real or paper coins. Teachers can choose between number identification and counting money exercises, allowing flexibility in reinforcing these vital concepts with their students.

Counting Money with Caterpillars

Piggy Banks

In this activity, students examine and sort coins, adding them to their piggy banks, trying to reach specific totals, or adding up to an amount teachers choose in advance. It is a great exercise to practice counting and see how to add by ones, fives, and tens, giving students exposure to different denominations of coins.

Piggy Banks

Collecting Coins

This game follows the board game format, letting kids jump from space to space until they reach the piggy bank at the end. Your kindergartner will enjoy the fun competition, and you can emphasize how to count how many coins they accumulate along the way.

Collecting Coins

Grocery Cards Game

Students will love seeing pictures of foods and products, like fruits, vegetables, toothpaste, and bread, from grocery stores as they learn about pricing and value. You can show them how produce and other items cost money and go over the concept of making transactions in stores.

Grocery Cards Game

Roll and Cover Money Games

These ready-to-go games allow students to practice counting pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, covering boxes on their gameboards. Your students will like them because they can win the game by getting correct answers in a row, keeping them engaged during play while they deepen their understanding of different currencies.

Roll and Cover Games

The Hungry Caterpillars

Based on the children’s book, this game has students count coins and learn how to make change as they eat different foods along the way. Teachers can connect the financial literacy lessons to ELA, science, and art, making the game ideal for supplementing any curriculum.

Hungry Caterpillars

Going on a Coin Hunt

In this activity, kids participate in a scavenger hunt to find eggs filled with coins hidden around the room, giving them chances to move and learn. They record how many coins are in each egg, and teachers can tell them the value of each.

Coin Scavenger Hunt

Miniature Golf Money Game

This exercise gives kids a fun way to practice their coin identification and arithmetic using a mini-golf-themed approach that many students will like. Educators will appreciate the attractive – and printable –  gameboard that encourages students to keep learning. 

Mini-Golf Game

Hands-On Activities

Kindergarteners learn on multiple levels, including kinesthetic and tactile, when participating in hands-on activities. These exercises will have kids cementing ideas and boosting their learning in no time.

Sensorial Coin Sorting

Kindergarteners are still exploring their senses and learning in numerous ways, and this activity capitalizes on these senses. They feel the various coins, getting an idea for pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters based on their texture, weight, and more, offering teachers a more in-depth approach to teaching money.

Fine Motor Play with Coins

This collection of hands-on games and lesson supplements offers your kindergarteners several exciting and unique approaches. You will find piggy bank filling, play dough coin hunts, and tower-building games so students can improve fine motor skills while they learn about money.

Graphing Coins

Teachers can have kids complete graphs and charts distinguishing between various coins, keeping tabs on how many they find of each type. This activity strengthens categorization, sorting, and counting skills, which is sure to please educators everywhere. 

Coin Value Clip Cards

You can create simple cards using cardstock and have kids identify the displayed amount on each card by moving clothespins to the correct answer. You can assess student understanding of value while the kids have a more interactive system to show their answers. 

Coin Design

Your young learners can design a new coin, decorating it with pictures, words, symbols, and colors. In this creative exercise, your students get to use their imagination while learning about values, unique denominations, and why coins contain similarities and differences.

Sorting Coins

Educators can get a lot out of this straightforward activity, helping to hammer their lessons home with minimal preparation. This exercise is an excellent supplement to your teaching and involves students going through a stack of coins and sorting them into various compartments.

Cupcake Coin Sort

All you need for this activity is a cupcake or muffin tin, liners, and some coins. You label the liners with different amounts, and students put the correct amount in each spot, giving you a quick assessment of their skills.

Donut Shop

Your kindergarteners will enjoy pretending to run a donut shop creating sweet creations while calculating costs. Students decorate butcher paper with paper donuts, icing, sprinkles, and more, all worth money, and they figure out how much to charge for their inventions.

Coin Sorting Mat

Teachers can create mats with various boxes labeled for different denominations and have students sort coins correctly. You can see how your students are doing in real-time as these mats lay on the floor, and you can monitor how the kids’ sorting goes.

DIY Foldable Books

Educators can have students create foldable books for each type of coin, go into detail about how much each is worth, draw pictures of various denominations, and list the distinct features of each. This activity is an excellent way to enhance student understanding of coin attributes.

Beginning Sounds and Coins

This activity is outstanding for connecting English skills with your money education strategies. You can write the beginning letter of the primary U.S. coins – P for pennies, N for nickels, D for dimes, and Q for quarters – and have students lay out the corresponding coin on the letter shape.

Color the Coins

With a simple worksheet, you can tell kids to color the appropriate coin on the page. You color all the quarters a specific color, the nickels another one, and so on, giving students fine motor skill practice along with currency identification.

The Pig Game

This hands-on game involves a spinner and a piggy bank, and all teachers have to do is hand out the worksheets. Teachers can draw a circle with different coins, make a spinner with a paper clip, and have students spin and total their amounts in the piggy bank as they play.

Hundred Chart Arithmetic

Kindergarteners are only beginning to see what value means with money, but they can recognize patterns and make connections between specific numbers. Teachers will love watching students use a hundred chart to place coins on and do basic arithmetic, like placing quarters on the number 25 and adding dimes to make ten more.

Cut and Paste Worksheets

Teachers can find resources or create their own worksheets with blank word strips for filling in coin names, paper coins, and images of bills to help students understand money more thoroughly. You can count on kids having fun and learning as they cut out papers and paste the correct answers on their sheets.

Task Cards

Educators can create many task card activities with various characters like animals, robots, and aliens. These cards direct kids to complete specific tasks, like coloring the correct amount of money shown on the character, totaling up various coins, and many other activities you may imagine.

About the Author

Peter Brown

Peter Brown is a National Board Certified teacher with over two decades of experience in the classroom. He loves working with students of all ages in many subjects, but particularly in practical areas like money education, to help kids achieve their goals. When he is not teaching or writing about financial literacy, you can find him surfing, hiking, skiing, or traveling to new places.

Last updated on: September 4, 2023