I got really annoyed today when I was helping Isaac with a maths worksheet. It was from his kindergarten and was on the topic of counting coins. Isaac has a vague concept of counting money but the worksheet wasn’t helping.

For eg. what kind of question is this: "10 cents less than 55 cents is ____ cents."?

That’s a badly constructed sentence and doesn’t teach the kids the concept of addition or subtraction in a logical manner. It would have been more correct to say "____ cents is 55 cents minus 10 cents."

A big problem with how schools teach mathematics, as well as test the students, is that it demands high-level English skills without realizing that kids take time before they can understand such sentence structures. Parents often criticize the PSLE for having math questions that test one’s English standard rather than their Math ability. So many teachers or curriculum directors would rather roll the word "pedagogy" around their mouth than actually understand what they’re doing.

To cut the long story short, I came up with a 3-page worksheet with pictures of Singapore coins to teach my son how to count different combinations of currency. It’s very basic, but I’ve saved it in a Word 97 .doc format so you can download it for yourself and make edits if you wish. It goes up to $3.00 but hey, you can bump it up to $100 if you wish, I think the page can take that many 50ct coins.

If your child becomes a financial wizard thanks to this document, please be sure to send a cheque my way!

Please download it here

download: How To Count Money (1.19MB) added: 16/11/2009 clicks: 4662 description: A simple guide for kids on how to count money with local Singapore currency coins.