Free Printable Play Money for Real World Consumer Math Lesson Plans

Hello my Omschooligan friends! Teacher Omi (that's me! it means "Grandma" in Dutch) here with some flashback fun for kids. When I was young, I loved to pretend I had a grownup job in an office, hospital or grocery store. My Opi (grandpa) was a printer for a newspaper and he brought me all kinds of stationery supplies to play with. My favorite was play money. I thought you might like some play money for your recycled cardboard grocery store we just made a few days ago. Teachers and homeschool parents, use play money in your preschool math learning centers. 

Money math lesson plans

Money math is a favorite hands-on preschool lesson plan. 

• Students can learn consumer math skills by pretending to run a grocery store. 
• Interacting with play money, teaches children to count, add, subtract, multiply, divide
• Counting money develops skip counting skills and times tables, counting by fives, tens and twenty-five. 
• Making change teaches counting backwards.
• Consumer math is great way to demonstrate positive and negative numbers. Positive numbers are money you have. Negative numbers can be thought of as money you owe.
• Money math teaches fractions, decimals and percent.
• Consumer math helps students learn about using credit, interest, fees, sales an discounts as examples.

Ways to use printable play money

Here are links to free printable play money. Print play money and use in preschool learning centers like practical life, math center and house area. Use free printable play money in math classes like

• marketing
• life skills 
• economics
• business math
• special needs

Free printable play money

• Free Stuff 4 Kids has free printable play money. Print out one, five and ten dollar bills.
• Money Instructor has free printable money math worksheets that you can personalize with the kind and number of bills and coins you need. Print play money coins: pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters and half dollars. Print bills in one, five, ten, twenty and fifty dollar denominations.
• Free Stuff 4 Kids has free printable play checks for students. Practice banking, check writing, checkbook balancing and accounting. 
• This blog lets you print exact duplicates of American money. Print currency: one, five, ten and twenty dollar bills.
• Activity Village has several pages of free printable Euros in many denominations. You can print American money and play money to. 
• Sparkle Box has money math games and play money printables, too.

Money math in the real world

The best way to learn new skills, Montessori teaches is to practice them in real world applications. That builds HOTS or higher order thinking skills. Bloom's Taxonomy says that regular lesson plans in which students memorize and demonstrate comprehension of facts, is limited. Students just learn to regurgitate data rather than impacting or being impacted by it. 

Bloom's Taxonomy Model of Omschool Market 

Here is an outline of how money math lesson plans help build higher-order thinking skills, based on the provided Bloom’s Taxonomy for ‘Money Math’ chart:

• Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS)

  • Creation (Apex of the pyramid)

    • Plan and design a classroom market

    • Develop a simple business model

    • Create an entire micro-economy

  • Evaluation

    • Assess complex financial choices

    • Determine the financial impact of debt

    • Evaluate investment options

  • Analysis

    • Analyze a personal budget

    • Distinguish "needs" vs. "wants"

    • Compare prices to find the best value

• Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS)

  • Application

    • Use play money for transactions

    • Make change

    • Calculate simple totals

  • Remembrance & Understanding (Base of the pyramid)

    • Recognize denominations

    • Identify coins and bills

    • Understand basic counting

Stay tuned for my next post where we'll take your mad money math skills to the next level!