Money Matters

Part of preparation to go to the U.S. is practising to convert $ to Rand. This involves checking the exchange rate every morning and while Tammy is going to do that for the next couple of weeks, I let her enter the data on Excel and insert a chart: since starting that at the beginning of the week, the Rand has steadily strengthened against the $ and it shows on her chart. This morning Tammy proudly announced today that the Rand has strengthened!

She then converts $1 - $10 dollars as well as $100 and $1000. In the beginning she has made lots of mistakes, but she has done 2 sheets without a single mistake.
Example:
R 8. 35
x 8 (How does one underline this on a blogpost?!)
66 . 80

Today she made 2 mistakes - both with adding e.g with the above calculation when she had to add 4 + 2 she wrote 7!! Tammy, Tammy....!

She loves these calculations and I love them too as they involve multiplication, adding and the use of the decimal point. She also has to estimate the answer before calculating it i.e. 8 x 8 = 64 and 8 x 9 = 72 so the answer must be between 64 and 72, but today it will be closer to 64 because 35c is closer to R8 than R9. Since estimating the answer, she has made far fewer mistakes! This is also what she will use if she has to convert $ to R without a calculator or pencil and paper.

The other money matters that we practice is rounding prices. I have started with it last year, but only now feels that she understands. So we go through newspaper ads and she reads me the real price and then what it "actually" costs. R69.99 = R70.00. Great fun.

We also count money. We have been doing it for a long time, but it is not easy and Tammy has to really focus on not confusing R and c.

This week I also let Tammy "pay" for stuff.
She first counts her money to establish how much she can pay.
Then she has to round the price e.g R35.99 = R36.
Then she gives me enough cash to cover the price, but not too much (e.g. 2 x twenty Rand notes, seeing that she has no R10 note or coins to make up R6).
Then she has to calculate how much change she would get. (R40 - R35 = R5 .... + the 1c, but seeing that we no longer use 1c coins, the shop would round it and give her 5c.)

She has also calculated discounts e.g. 50%, 25% and 10% discounts. Percentages are not new to her, seeing that she always has to calculate the percentage of her homework or test results and we used percentages a lot when we covered the elections.

She still needs lots of practice, but she understands what it is all about and is very determined to crack it. This is very practical, fun numeracy and works for us.