Shopping Math: Money Word Problems with a Price Shelf

This 2nd grade shopping math worksheet opens with a shop shelf: five fruits sit along a teal plank with paper price tags hanging under them — a fig at 20¢, a pear at 40¢, a mango at 15¢, a papaya at 10¢, a lime at 25¢. Below are three story cards about money. In the first a named child buys two of the fruits and the question is how much they pay; in the second the child pays for one fruit with a coin drawn on the card, a quarter, and has to work out the change; in the third someone has 40¢ and the child circles yes or no to whether that is enough for two fruits, then writes the total. Each card has a dot grid for working and a dashed box for the answer in cents.

Money problems are word problems the child already believes in, and the shelf makes them honest: nothing in a story is a price the child cannot look up. To answer, the child has to find the right fruit, read its tag, and then decide what the story is asking — add two prices, subtract a price from the coin, or compare a total with the money in hand. Those three moves are the whole of second-grade money work, and the coin pictured in the change card keeps the amount paid real rather than a bare number. The teacher checks the yes-or-no card closely, because a child can circle the right answer and still write the wrong total.

Print the PDF free and let the child work on the dot grid before writing in the box, adding the prices in whichever order makes sense. The easier version has a four-item shelf and two cards with totals and yes-or-no questions only; the harder version has six fruits and four cards, including three-item totals and how much more one fruit costs than another. Counting coins is the page before this one for a child still learning coin values, and the multiplication and division word problems page carries the same read-the-story habit into third grade.