News From Buck’s House
My kids are so good to me. Sunday when I got home, Buck started sending messages to me. He had written a blog post for me with the hope that I would actually rest. What a sweet guy, right??
So here’s a post from Buck:
“I was in Dollar General looking for envelopes (I’m doing a whole envelope challenge, it’s a whole thing) right next to the envelopes was a cheap coin sorter. Not the cool kind but counting all my change it was on my to-do list so for $12 I figured why not?
I had a pretty decent-sized jar of change and Lucy was at a friend’s house so we cleaned off the table and got to work.
The tubes don’t necessarily “sort” your change but they do make it very convenient to place in tubes that are color-coded to match the funnels.
Scott absolutely loves sorting things, when he’s in the right mood he can clean the house faster than I can. He’s 6 and learning how to swap out garbage bags, take out the recycling, sweep (poorly), etc.
This was much more fun than a real coin sorter because we had a conversation about any little indifference he found.
We found a wheat penny (hard to find anymore) and I told him about how Grandma Jo has a pile of them and that these are very special.
Then we found a quarter the year Grandma Jo was born.
I pulled a random quarter and told him I would have only been 2 years older than he was when this quarter was made, his eyes got all big.
We went back and forth on how much each one was worth and if 2 dimes were worth a quarter (no) “okay so what would make it fair?” Kind of problems. I counted out 20 pennies and tried to trade him for a quarter and then tried to argue with him saying, “but I have so many and I only want one?!” He didn’t bite.
We also went through how some have ridges and some don’t so if you’re having trouble telling the difference between a nickel and a quarter we can feel that the nickel is thicker and the quarter has ridges so any time he had a question we could fall back on those basic rules. Naturally, you will run across a green dime or a brown quartes, etc. but if you fall back on what you know you can figure it out on your own.
Lilly ate her supper while we sorted coins.
You can find the coin sorters we used HERE on Amazon. We had lots of fun doing this.
Anyway, I have no idea if a bank will even count “self counted” rolls but it was a good $12 activity we can go back through every few months. It ties in quite a few basic skills, math, history, basic reasoning, etc. He was definitely the most focused I’ve seen him all weekend and that’s a Dad win any day of the week.”