The 4th-grade year is a bustling time, often more challenging than the previous years, as students move into upper elementary school. As a teacher, you know the importance of laying the groundwork for these learners’ futures in all subjects, and money education is equally important. Hopefully, you have solid lesson plans and materials to cover the essential topics 4th-graders should know. If not, don’t worry. Whether you are struggling to find plans or want to upgrade your current ones, head to the 4th-grade money lesson plans page to download all the materials you need for 4th-grade financial education!
Teaching the core concepts is crucial for 5th-grade success and beyond, but you will need more than only lessons to reinforce ideas. In this guide, you will find many games and activities that bring the topics you taught to life. Read on to uncover the best exercises, broken down by activity type, to cement your students’ financial knowledge and help them move forward in their academic careers.
Online Games
Gamifying money activity is a great way to engage your little learners. These games combine math practice with economic principles and money situations your 4th-graders will enjoy. They get to have fun clicking and dragging items within an exciting interface, and learn lots about money at the same time.
Cash Out Online Game
In this interactive game, your students will need to make the correct change for customers in a fast-paced environment, increasing their addition and subtraction skills and money awareness. The game is customizable for any grade, so teachers can include hints, remove timers, and adjust skill levels to make it ideal for their students.
Change Maker
Your 4th-graders will love the pace of this game, and you will like the arithmetic reinforcement and review of money denominations. Kids need to determine how much change to give, in bills and coins, as customers purchase various items, exposing them to real-life situations.
Dolphin Feed – Money Counting Game
In this oceanic adventure game, students will work on totaling quickly and understanding which currencies to click on, building up their familiarity with dollars and different coins. They see a cash amount, click on cash to build to that total, and for every correct answer, they get to feed more fish to their dolphins.
Hoop Shoot Money Game
Many 4th-graders enjoy playing basketball, and this online version will have them shooting hoops repeatedly while boosting their financial and math skills. Students get a price list of basketball-themed items, and whenever they get a problem correct, they get to shoot a basket. They can play it over and over to beat their personal high scores, making this one a go-to activity for many teachers.
Let’s Do Lunch
This game involves menus and prices, where students need to total specific food products to reach exact amounts. They will see a price list (like an actual menu, full of items and their costs) and have to figure out which things they can buy based on the amount of money they have.
Lunch Lady Online Game
This fun game works with various grade levels, particularly with 4th grade, as these students likely know how to work with decimals. Kids total the costs of different trays of food, helping the lunch lady feed as many students as possible within a specific time frame.
Making Change
The premise of this game is a character needs to make change at a baseball field snack shack. It reviews the value of different coins first, then quizzes students on how much change they would give for various items such as hot dogs, candy, and gum.
Maths Chase
This website is more of an arithmetic review and drill site than an online money game, but it will still benefit your 4th-graders significantly as they hammer down those addition, subtraction, and multiplication skills. Educators can adjust the levels of the math problems to fit the needs of their students, making this a valuable addition to any math and money-focused classroom.
Practice Giving Change
Your students learn about making change in this grade, how they can use different coins and bills to reach the same amounts. This interactive site starts with a mini-lesson, reinforcing what you may have taught your students about denominations and values, and moves into a game where they need to come up with the exact change for people buying products.
School Store
This click-and-play game follows a storyline where kids run the school store and need to make the correct change for their classmates’ various purchases. Your students will recognize familiar situations, like purchasing school supplies and rewards at the school store, and get to play the role of the cash register operator, making this a fun, engaging, and awareness-building activity for your 4th-graders.
Show Me the Money!
Your 4th-graders have seen decimals, but there is probably room for review, so they can better grasp how they work and how to add and subtract decimals, particularly in money situations. In this game, a character is successful at running his lemonade stand and has cash to spend, but needs help totaling the costs at the movie theater, where your students come in to assist.
Hands-On Activities
You will see many hands-on activities for your 4th-graders to enhance their financial education. These exercises improve their math skills dramatically, and you can use them in many ways. Teachers can set up stations with them, have individual students complete them alone, or kids can work in pairs or small groups to solve these engaging problems. Let’s take a look at some of these activities.
Fractions of a Dollar
Kids love to cut, and this activity even allows them to cut up money! Not real money, of course, but it sure looks like it to them. They work with fractions, money denominations, and coin-bill equivalencies to see how these things are related, in a fun and exciting game.
The Shopkeeper’s Game
This hands-on game involves the whole class, split into two halves: shopkeepers who take payments and consumers who have various price cards. Teachers play music as the consumers go around and around in a circle, and when it stops, they need to buy a product from the nearest shopkeeper who checks that the totals are correct.
Money Review Bingo Game
BINGO is often a hit with kids of all ages, but teachers can adapt it to any topic, including money education. 4th-grade teachers can create their own cards and rules specific to their classes, or you can find a pre-made version here that will have your students yelling out, “BINGO!” and learning money concepts.
Loose Change
This simple activity is quick to set up as a DIY project, where you label several cups with different cash amounts. You give kids piles of coins – pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters – and they must drop the correct amount into each cup. They learn that there are multiple ways to reach identical totals using various coins, and this exercise builds speed and money familiarity.
Money Worksheets
Teachers can generate unique money worksheets here, providing a customizable and fun way to assess student learning. You know your students best, and these sheets allow you to adjust and modify data to best engage your 4th-graders so they continue to grow and thrive in their financial knowledge.
Scoop and Total
If you need an independent activity that will engage your students during class or for homework, try this one. Your kids scoop a random number of coins out of a bag, go through the different types, count them, draw their images on a chart, and finally, total them.
Clean Up The Money Game
This partner game will have kids playing together, working with coins and coordinates, and becoming familiar with different currencies. Kids roll a pair of dice, one with letters (which you can create by adding labels to a regular die) and the other with numbers, and students determine the coordinates and remove coins from that spot.
Money Change Purchase Worksheets
These customizable worksheets allow teachers to enter whatever values they want to challenge their students or review math skills. These are word problems, so your students can boost reading comprehension, logic, and math strategies as they solve various problems to make change for purchases.
Counting Money Worksheet
This free worksheet is ideal for centers, but you can adapt them for individual work as well. The sheet has multiple columns filled with pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, and students roll a die for each column. They need to fill in how many coins they rolled and then complete quick multiplication to determine each column’s total amount of money.
Missing Coin Puzzles
These simple sheets are easy to set up for individual or partner work and reinforce money values, logical solutions, and creative thinking. Students need to determine which coins are missing from a row of coins, challenging them to find the correct answer based on money values and solving the puzzle.
