Concepts of money..or rather the lack of!!!

[JaysMum]

I am having real problems with teaching J about the concept of money.
Not just the typical cost of things. I mean the actual monetary values.
A trip to Woolies to spend his Christmas money is hard enough without him having to trawl around the store to find something that is actually £10. If it's £9.99 he wont buy it...it has to be £10 exactly.
J got so upset recently when he wanted to buy something that was 5p at a table top sale. He had only got a twenty pence piece left in his pocket and just could not accept that he could buy the item and get change.
Today my neighbour said her son, who shares the same birth date as J, didnt understand the value of money...perhaps I wasn't explaining our difficulty well enough. I do tend to ramble!!!!
I asked her son if he had two 50p pieces how much money would he have...he answered correctly £1. J shouted out "that's wrong you have 2 pennies".Arghhhh.
Taking it literally, then yes you do have two pennies, but the pennies equal £1.....it goes on..

Quotes from J that I will share....

"How can a piece of paper be the same as 500 pennies?"
"Paper is just paper...pennies are pennies."
"50p's are the biggest...so they are worth more because they are the King.But why have they got a Queen on them?"
"£1 coins are smaller than 50p's ...why are you telling me tales?..they can't be worth more than 50p's."
"5p's are the smallest so they are less than 1p's."

I didn't attempt the two pound coin and to be quite honest I think I will leave the money learning to a later date....that is unless any of you have any ideas......please...fingers crossed.

[mum38]

Hi there
Don't know if this is of any help but with my older son I got lots of pennies and lined up all the coins and put their worth in pennies next to them. Then I explained because it makes peoples purses too heavy we use a 20p coin instead of 20 pennies etc. With the different sizes I just said that they need to be different shapes and sizes for blind people to tell them apart.

We also got a till from ELC and put real money in it and put labels on some stuff and played shop. We started with exact amonts first and when he was ok with that starting with the idea of change. It's a difficult concept to get-my ds with speech & language problems isn't really ready yet.

[coppertop]

No advice unfortunately but the "How can a piece of paper be the same as 500 pennies" sounds so familiar. Ds1 has a piggy bank to put his money in. When it gets to a certain amount we put it into his bank account. It's too much of a pain to take £1 coins to the bank so every now and again I exchange some of the coins in his piggy bank for a £5 or £10 note. He saw me doing this one day so I explained to him that 10 £1 coins are the same as a £10 note. He burst out laughing and said "You're being silly!"

[JaysMum]

coppertop....nice to know Im not the only one who gets told shes silly when I swop coins for notes....he thinks Im "Bill the Burgular" when Im doing the change over.....just glad he hasnt phoned the cop shop to tell them "Bills in the house"!!!!!!