Naplan year 3 and 5 Numeracy - Fun Money practice

Both Year 3 and Year 5 Naplan numeracy tests may contain questions related to money and working out costs and change.  To practice these skills in a fun way I got out some cash and the junk mail from the letterbox!

First of all for our Year 3 daughter, I would grab a handful of random coins, pass them to her and she would add up the total value of the coins.

This is one type of question that we have found on several year 3 Naplan tests.

The next step was to grab a catalogue for one shop from the junk mail pile. We started out with supermarkets.  I told both girls they had $10 each to spend. They had to choose what they would buy from the catalogue, work out how much they choices cost and how much change they would then have from their original $10. This is to practice working out total costs and change which can come up in questions in both year 3 and 5 Naplan tests.

It was interesting to see the different ways both girls did this task. Our youngest chose her items and one by one subtracted their cost from her $10 so she saw exactly how much money she had left after each choice.  This meant she got lots of practice at subtraction!

Our elder daughter wrote down each item and it's cost on a separate piece of paper, then added up the total which she then subtracted from the original $10. So she only had to do one addition and one subtraction calculation - but it also meant she had to be able to estimate how much she was spending as she was choosing!

Both girls really enjoyed this task - they went through most of the junk mail catalogues - shopping for all sorts of things - sports gear, toiletries and lots of chocolate! They bought things for themselves and gifts for others too!  For the supermarkets I allowed them $10 each, but for bigger shops I allowed $100 each!   You could also use $1000 or larger values for furniture shops for example.

This gives them practice with money, addition, subtraction, decimal points and estimation.  Both grade 3 and 5 need these skills - grade 5 kids just need to be able to do all of this with larger numbers than grade 3 kids. From information I found on a Naplan website - for year 3 kids need to be able to perform money calculations up to $10, and year 5 kids up to $1000.

This is a great activity that you can do with your kids any time with no preparation other than having some junk mail in the house!  Our kids really enjoyed it and kept on shopping after I'd left them to it by themselves!