Counting Money: All Four Coins in Every Purse

Six purses, five to seven coins in each, and every kind of coin in play — pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters can all turn up in the same handful on this Grade 1 page. The child works out the value of each purse and writes the total in cents in the box beside it. It is the fullest version of the coin-counting task and comfortably the busiest sheet in the money family.

With seven mixed coins in front of them, a child needs a method rather than good luck. The one worth teaching is order: sort the coins from the largest value down to the smallest, count the quarters first, then count on in tens, then fives, then ones. Children who instead work left to right across the picture lose their place constantly. The classic error also shows up here more than anywhere else — counting the number of coins rather than their values, so a purse holding six coins gets reported as six cents. Both habits are plainly visible in the answers.

The sheet prints free as a PDF and makes a fair end-of-unit check. Coin counting practice offers the same four coins in smaller handfuls for warming up first, and mental math within 20 sharpens the adding that every total on this page depends on.