A handful of coins, a pretend shop, and a child working out real change for the first time. Shop and Change turns percentages and money arithmetic, two things that often feel dry on a worksheet, into something with an obvious, immediate point.
What you need
A handful of coins and notes, real or play money. A few household items to “sell,” each with a small price tag attached.
How to play
Set up a simple pretend shop: a few items around the house, each with a price written on a small tag. Give your child a set amount of money and ask them to “buy” something, working out how much change they should receive.
Once simple change-making feels comfortable, introduce percentages using the money itself, since currency is genuinely one of the easiest, most intuitive ways to teach the concept. Explain: a hundred cents make a dollar (or the equivalent in your own currency), so a percentage is simply a way of describing a part of a hundred. Show that fifty percent of a dollar is fifty cents, exactly half; twenty-five percent is twenty-five cents, a quarter; ten percent is ten cents, a tenth.
Build word problems together using the shop: “This toy costs ten dollars, but it’s twenty-five percent off today. How much do you pay?” Work through it step by step: twenty-five percent of ten dollars is two dollars and fifty cents, so the toy now costs seven dollars and fifty cents.
Variations
Take the shop outdoors to an actual shop, with your child’s permission to handle a small real purchase and work out the change themselves before the cashier does, a genuinely motivating way to put the skill to real use.
For an older child, introduce the idea of a sale stacking with tax, or compare two different discounts (“which is the better deal, twenty percent off, or ten dollars off a fifty dollar item?”) to build a bit of real comparative reasoning on top of the basic calculation.
Why it works
Percentages and change-making are genuinely useful, everyday skills, and children tend to sense that immediately once the numbers are attached to something they recognise as real: actual money, an actual purchase, an actual decision about whether something is a good deal. That immediate relevance tends to produce far more engaged practice than the same calculations presented as an abstract worksheet exercise.
A pretend shop and a pile of coins is a small, low-cost setup. What a child takes from it, real confidence handling money and genuine comfort with percentages, two skills they will use for the rest of their life far more often than almost anything else from a primary maths curriculum, tends to be worth considerably more than the setup required to get there.
