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The Money Muncher

by Angela Thayer 2 Comments

Happy Thursday! So glad you are here. I want to share with you a fun activity today that focuses on sorting and fine motor skills–it’s called The Money Muncher. To create this activity, you will need to make a Money Muncher with a tennis ball and an exacto knife. Cut a slit across the ball like the picture below and please don’t slice any fingers!

Cutting the Tennis Ball Then draw some eyes or glue on googley eyes. When you squeeze the ball the mouth will open!

Tennis Ball I thought my 3 year old would be able to squeeze the ball just fine…but I was wrong. He couldn’t at all. I’m sure as his hands gets stronger, he will be able to master this skill, but right now he cannot. So I decided to modify this activity a little bit. I helped him out and squeezed the ball. For starters, we filled him up with marbles. Troy practiced counting as he did this. He also had fun shaking the full tennis ball!

Marble Muncher

Then we moved on to the money part. He loves coins! Troy loves collecting coins and putting them in our coin jar. He thinks coins are way better than dollars…I’m sure his view on that will change someday. 🙂

He was excited when I got the coins out for this activity, since we rarely take them out of the jar! I had him sort them by coins. Now he doesn’t know the names of each coin, so I also introduced that to him. He usually just calls everything either a penny or a quarter.

Sorting Coins

Next, we got out the Money Muncher. The Money Muncher (me) would say which coins he was hungry for and then Troy would fill his mouth with those coins. We went through each group of coins. This was also fun for imaginary/dramatic play. 🙂

Money Muncher- great for building fine motor skills and working with money!

He loved this activity and thought the Money Muncher was so much fun! I wished he could’ve squeezed the ball himself, but I’m sure he will be able to in the future. I loved that he was able to sort the coins and learn to identify them with this activity. I hope you’ll try this out and let me know how it goes! To learn more about fine motor skills, see this post.

 

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Filed Under: Fine Motor Skills, Math

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  1. Anne Canham says

    October 20, 2013 at 6:19 am

    I’m very excited about all these activities to do at our Pre-School. I will improvise the learning materials as we are unable to purchase due to us being a non-profit in a disadvantaged area and parents here have serious financial restraints. Thank youi so much for sharing. I will send pictures of the replicas we going to make.

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Trackbacks

  1. 18 Fun Ways to Teach Kids About Money (Ideas for Grades PreK-12!) | Free Homeschool Deals © says:
    April 13, 2018 at 11:01 am

    […] The Money Muncher – Grab a tennis ball and create this fun game! This is a fun way to work on coin identification and also counting skills. […]

    Reply
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