First of all, to my friends in 5SK, I’m SO sorry you’ve been waiting so long for this post! We ended up needing another day to get our presentations “just so” before we shared them.
And so for those of you who are not from 5Sk (a Year 5 class in Queensland, Australia), let me fill you in on what’s going on.
I have been talking to Ms. Scharf for a little while, and received an email from her the other day with a request. She also posted it on her blog:
The challenge from Ms. Scharf for her 5SK friends.
I was beyond excited about this question because 1) I knew my friends could answer it and help their Aussie friends, and 2) this was a REAL, AUTHENTIC audience with a REAL problem that we needed to solve–talk about motivating!
So after talking through what we needed to do first (which was research the Australian money system so we knew what connections to make and so we’d have some background knowledge), as well as all the things we needed to include in our responses.
And so, after two days of working, here’s what we came up with for our friends:
And last, but not least, one group made a poster to explain their answer:
Fiona, Anna K., Sammy and Rebekah chose to explain their thinking in a poster.
So what do you think? 5SK friends–did we help you? Please write and tell us what you think. We’d also love to hear how your Pocket Money Challenge went today! 🙂
20somethingkids and 1kookyteacher 
Thank you Mrs. Bearden and your class for making those wonderful videos and the poster, it really helps me and the rest of the class to understand American currency. I’ve learned so much from that, e.g;
A penny = 1c You need 100 pennies to make $1.
A nickel = 5c You need 20 nickels to make a dollar.
A dime = 10c You need 10 dimes to make $1.
A quarter = 25c You need 4 quarters to make a dollar.
A half dollar = 50c You need 2 half dollars to make a dollar.
An interesting fact I learnt was that America has three ways to show $1! A dollar bill, the golden dollar and the silver dollar. Thank you again Mrs. Bearden and your class for spending all that time making videos and posters to help us work out the American currency.
Mrs Bearden and class,
We were so excited today to see your post. The videos and poster are fantastic! You have all done so much work and should be so proud. We will put many more comments on tomorrow.
Mrs Bearden,
I think what you do everyday with our kids is wonderful and amazing!!! You seem to make learning so much fun. Communicating with classes in other countries and making movies to help our kids learn is just awesome. Thanks for all of the excitement and creativity that you put into teaching!!!!
We were beyond excited when we saw the post. Our Principal, Mrs Franklin even came over to watch the videos with us. What a way to learn!
Today we applied our new knowledge by completing a set of money questions. The students were able to easily solve the problems with their new schema. Zac was also able to bring a bag of coins in today to show us what they look like. It was so interesting to look at the difference in sizes. We will add a post tomorrow on that topic tomorrow. Mrs Franklin gave us a one dollar note. I think we may have to frame this to remind us of our wonderful experience.
Mrs Franklin has set us a new challenge which we will work on over the next few school days. I must say that I am very interested to find out how to tell the difference between the notes without looking at them.
Can you guess what 5SK asked after watching the video? You guessed it. Can we make a video? Definitely!
Thank you again Mrs Bearden and class. You have provided us with such an exciting learning opportunity and we are very thankful.