Coin Recognition Bingo

We've had this idea in our heads for some time now but always wanted to do something a bit special with it.

Well, here it is a Coin Recognition bingo game, with a difference... what's the difference? A good dash of mathstick's quality!

 The resource consists of a series of Bingo Boards, each depicting nine stamps. The stamps show different monetary values, one of each coin.

In the first instance a Bingo Board could be used as a simple collecting, sorting and matching activity. With the children identifying a coin and matching it to its monetary value on the appropriate stamp.

As a Bingo game, however, each child should have a board and the group also need a selection of coins in a bag. If you are using the first set of four Bingo Boards you will need a collection of 1p, 2p, 5p and 10p coins (the second set of boards needs 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p and 50p coins). The game then proceeds as follows:

• The children take it in turns to select a coin at random from the bag, if the value of that coin appears on a stamp on their Bingo Board they can cover it with the coin.
• The bag of coins is passed to the next person and play continues.
• The winner is the first person to cover all of their coins.

If you wish you could let the children also play for a ‘line’ in which case they could win a point for covering stamps in a line of three in any direction, and win two points for completing the board. Other rules could easily be added, such as winning a point for covering all four corners of the grid.

Here's a game in progress - with a winning line!

We have found the game works best when the children are using actual coins, after all the focus is on coin recognition, and that recognition includes the feel of a real coin, the sharpness of the edges, the hardness of the metal. Plastic imitation coins fall far short of this. However, if you want to limit the number of real coins in use the children could return the coin to the bag once they have identified it and cover the relevant stamp with a counter.
 

Cheating?

Some children think others are cheating because they are feeling the coins in the bag rather than taking them out at random. However, as we have just outlined above, we don’t think of it as cheating; if a child is using touch to help them recognise the difference between a 2p and a 20p coin then they clearly have a good understanding of the differences between the coins and are developing quite a useful skill.

However, if you want to make the game truly random you could involve another child/adult as the official coin selector... or, do what we did, and give the children a woollen glove to wear!

The free 9-page pdf attachment (below) contains a short explanation and eight further pages of Bingo Boards: four using 1p, 2p, 5p and 10p coins, and four more using 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p and 50p coins.

We hope you enjoy using this as much as we enjoyed designing and testing it. Please let us know by using the comment box below.

We have an additional version of this resource involving calcualtion and counting.

If you find this maths resource useful please send us some Google +1 love,
and let your friends and colleagues know about mathsticks.com