Dimes and Pennies

A dime is ten pennies. Count the dimes, then the pennies.

Book Place value to 100 1.NBT.B.2 ALPACA · Early operations

New to coins? Start here. A short lesson on what each coin is worth — including why the small one beats the big one. About about 4 minutes.

Show me how coins work → How much is each coin again?

▤ Print this All of 1st grade

For grown-ups

How long: 10 to 15 minutes is plenty. Short and frequent beats long and occasional — the early-numeracy trials with the largest effects ran eight weeks or less.
When they get one wrong: the page shows the working. Read it together rather than moving straight on. Feedback that explains is worth several times more than feedback that only marks right or wrong, and that gap is wider in maths than in any other subject.
Not timed: thinking time is the point of a book. Let silences run.
Print it too: doing the same problems on paper a few days later is worth more than doing twice as many today.

What this practises

Knowing the coins by name, and counting dimes and pennies as tens and ones.

Stated plainly, because it matters here more than usual: Common Core has NO grade-1 money standard, and neither does Illustrative Mathematics. This activity is mapped to 1.NBT.B.2 — that ten ones make a ten — and to IM Unit 4 "Numbers to 99", because counting dimes and pennies IS counting tens and ones and the mapping is structural rather than a stretch. It is not offered as money instruction ahead of the standard: quarters and mixed handfuls are 2.MD.C.8 and Money Math has them. Coin NAMING is included because grade 2 assumes it and several state frameworks place it at grade 1, and the literature is consistent that coins should be met one at a time before being mixed. No efficacy trial sits behind any of that.

The underlying idea: Dimes and pennies are a place-value manipulative that exists outside the classroom. The structure is identical to base-ten blocks — ten of the small one makes the big one — with the difference that a child has seen coins used, which is the case for almost no other manipulative on this site.
Where this sits in Illustrative Mathematics: 1st grade Unit 4: Numbers to 99
Sources: Illustrative Mathematics / Kendall Hunt (2024) · Illustrative Mathematics (2024) all references →

Related measured skill: ALPACA · Early operations. What this means