Of all the grade-2 topics, money has the biggest home-field advantage: no child volunteers for a word problem about kilometres, but almost every child wants to know if their pocket money covers the ice cream. The curriculum expects confident work with amounts up to €100 by the end of grade 2 — and unlike most topics, this one can be practised straight at the kitchen table with real coins, no worksheet required.
The second reason money is worth the effort: it's essentially the same crossing-ten skill already known from addition and subtraction — with one advantage. Coins and notes make the groups of ten visible. A €2 coin plus a €1 coin is tangibly €3, not just an abstract string of digits.
Adding up first, making change second
As with crossing ten, don't tackle everything at once. Start with the easier direction — adding up an amount from several coins. Place a €2, a 50-cent and a 20-cent coin on the table and ask: “How much is that altogether?” The child sorts, orders by size, and adds — concretely, with real objects in hand.
Only once that's solid does the harder direction come in: making change. “The ice cream costs €2.50. You pay with a €5 note. How much do you get back?” That's subtraction with crossing ten, dressed up as an everyday situation — usually the first word problem a child actually wants to solve rather than merely has to.
The counting-up trick for change
For change-making there's a strategy every cashier uses in real life, and it happens to be an excellent method to teach: don't subtract, count up instead. From €2.50 to €5 the natural path is: 50 cents up to €3, then €2 more up to €5 — that's €2.50 back, added together.
That's the same counting-up idea recommended for crossing ten in addition and subtraction: instead of grinding through subtraction, find the gap to the next round number and count on from there. Children who learn this trick with money often transfer it back to ordinary arithmetic problems on their own.
The cents trap when writing amounts
One stumbling block is purely notational, not computational: as soon as amounts get written down, the decimal point shows up — and with it a common mistake. “3 euros 5 cents” often gets written as “€3.5” instead of the correct “€3.05”. The child computed correctly but swapped place values when writing it down — the same skill needed for crossing ten: understanding that a digit's position carries a specific value, whether or not a digit — or a zero — sits there.
The fix: always say it separately first — “3 euros and 5 cents” — and only then jointly derive the written form: cent places are always two digits after the decimal point, padded with a leading zero if needed.
Three everyday drills, no worksheet needed
Money needs no extra practice material — everyday life supplies it on its own:
- The piggy-bank check: once a week, count together how much is in the piggy bank. Estimate first, then count — this trains rough estimation almost incidentally.
- The shopping list: on the next grocery run, have your child add up two or three prices before the cashier does. Racing the till motivates almost every child on its own.
- The pocket-money question: “Does it cover both things together?” is a genuine word problem, just without the word-problem wrapping that triggers instant resistance in many kids.
Money is one of the few topics where practice doesn't feel like practice. Use that before school reduces it to a page of written sums — the crossing-ten skill that change-making trains on the side pays off in every other kind of arithmetic too.