How I have worked with my son and his teachers’ in order to help him learn the abstract concept of coins and values.

A MULTISENSORY APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING COINS AND THEIR VALUES

INSIGHTS INTO LANGUAGE BASED LEARNING ISSUES

As you may know from visiting the Lipstick Wisdom site previously or from watching some of my other video blogs – my son has learning issues; specifically language based learning issues. This basically means he has problems with learning new concepts (information going in – receptive language issues) as well as problems with language concepts coming out (expressive language issues). You would not notice a thing on everyday interactions but when you ask him a question, the problems become apparent.

So I wanted to share with you some of the strategies that I have used at home to help my son understand abstract concepts. The abstract concept I am going to discuss today is coins and the values of coins. This one was a doozy – let me tell you!! He has made tremendous progress – he is not 100% consistent but definitely progress has been made. It probably took us about 8 weeks before significant traction was made on his learning his coins and the values.

First of all, I must share with you that my son’s best learning occurs when the learning is coordinated with physical movement (kinetic learning). I guess before the concepts of time and coins were introduced, I used kinetic learning approachs but not 100% of the time. Now I try to use kinetic approaches as much as possible.

We (his teachers and I) started out with the standard multisensory approach of worksheets, enlarged paper coins in the classroom, play coins in the classroom and even some real coins. We practiced and practiced through this approach for several weeks to no avail. He could not identify the coins and he did not understand the difference between the physical count of coins and their values.

Then we started mixing things up trying to come up with an approach that would help make the concepts stick in his mind. The strategies we used included: (I show physical examples of these in the video)

1. A mystery box where he had to feel a coin that he could not see and try to guess which coin it was.
2. A paper “dice” with a coin and its value on each side.
3. Playing shopping games where items were placed on a sheet with a value underneath. When he chose an item to purchase, he needed to identify the coins and their values in order to purchase the item. We even used our toy cash registers.
4. A cheat sheet with real coins glued on them with the names of the coins and their values prominently written.
5. Enlarged paper coins and real coins that he would examine with a magnifying glass.
6. Flash cards with the name of the coin and the value.
7. Worksheets, worksheets, worksheets …

He really enjoyed both the mystery box and the pretend shopping games as well as the paper dice. With the paper dice, we actually “batted” the dice back and forth, letting it drop to the ground. My son would then have to look at the picture and tell me the coin and its value.

We had been working with the worksheets, the mystery box, the paper dice and the pretend shopping games for a while with little progress being made. I thought, at that point, that perhaps his short term working memory issues that were holding him back. I decided to make up the cheat sheet with the real coins so that when we were doing worksheets, he would not get so frustrated. What I discovered at that point was that he was having visual perception issues – he could not tell the difference between the coins – literally. With the cheat sheet, all he had to do was match a real coin to the cheat sheet to come up with answers. He could not match the coins!

At this point, we started examining both real coins and the large paper coins with a magnifying glass so that he really really looked at the differences between the coins. He loved using the magnifying glass!! We also introduced simple flash cards.

At a certain point, things started to click and he began to correctly identify the coins and their values. Like I said, it is not 100% consistent at this point, but introducing the different approaches to understanding coins and their values definitely helped my son in ultimately grasping the concept.