A hundreds chart is standard issue in many primary grade classrooms. It is simply a 10-by-10 grid that lists all the numbers, one to 100. With a supply of nickels and dimes, a child can practice skip counting by 5s and 10s by placing a nickel on every fifth space or a dime on every tenth space.
Shopping activities provide a practical approach to teaching kids to count nickels and dimes. Give your child a baggie of coins or ask her to use the ones in her piggy bank. Have a pretend store where everything is priced in increments of five and ten, or give the child a word problem such as "John wants to buy a toy truck for 65 cents. How many ways can you make 65 cents with nickels and dimes?" Have the child count out how many coins of each type she needs to pay for the toy.
Young children often do not understand the concept of having "enough" for a purchase. Counting nickels and dimes and comparing the amount with the cost of an item helps the child better understanding the concepts of "more than..." and "less than..." as well as reinforcing the purchasing power of coin savings. Give your child a fixed number of nickels and dimes, then show him a number of items that are priced at different values. Ask him to count up whether he has enough, and determine how many coins he either needs or would have left over.
Make up a set of BINGO boards with money amounts in multiples of five cents and ten cents. Call out a number of nickels and dimes. Children add up the total and place a token on any match on their boards. They may use nickel and dime manipulatives to help with counting. The first person to get five in a row wins.
A child who already understands counting nickels and dimes by fives and tens can transfer that knowledge to learning her times tables. Multiplication is, in its simplest sense, a fast way to add equal groups. Explain that each nickel represents a group of five and each dime represents a group of ten. If you have eight dimes, that is the same as eight groups of 10 or 8 x 10. Give the child an example, and ask him to tell you or write down how many groups of what amount he has, the corresponding multiplication sentence and the total. For example, six nickels equals six groups of five to make 30 cents but can also be written as 6 x 5 = 30.