Familiarize kindergartners with the appearance of the penny through arts and crafts. Help kindergartners glue shiny pennies to magnets, hair accessories or fabric to make simple jewelry. Use felt for an sturdy fabric that requires no hemming. Cut felt into strips long enough for bracelets. Glue on pennies for decoration. Apply velcro for a bracelet closure that even small children can manage. Make penny pendant necklaces. Cut shapes out of felt. Glue pennies on your shape. Punch a hole in it and string it with yarn. Alternately, teach children how to do crayon rubbings of pennies. Tell children to place two pennies under thin paper. Help them color over the pennies to make a rubbing. This is a great opportunity to emphasize the difference between the heads and tails sides.
Teach children simple games with pennies. Explain the concept of heads and tails to the children, and the pictures on either side, then have them play heads or tails in pairs. This reinforces the difference in the two sides of the coin. As a class project, have groups of children make penny launchers in teams. Make launchers from cardboard wrapping paper tubes and masking tape, then have the teams race pennies. Play store. Set up a store with inexpensive prizes marked with different prices in cents. Hand out 10 pennies to each student. Students play store, counting their money and deciding how to use it. Make sure kids know ahead of time that all play store purchases are final and no trading is allowed to avoid any problems with hurt feelings. Construct a penny toss as a class project. On a table-size piece of paper, have kids trace circular objects such as pencils or coffee cans in bright colors. Tape the paper to a table, and play penny toss. Each student can toss five pennies, and every penny that lands completely in one shape is a point. The one who accumulates the most points wins.
Teach children songs about pennies to remember what pennies are worth, what they look like and who is pictured on pennies. Use music in the public domain or write your own lyrics to a well-known children's melody. For added fun, make penny instruments. Put pennies in a plastic bottle and screw the lid on tight to make a shaker. Make simple penny maracas with paper plates. Let students decorate the plates. Fold them in half and staple them shut. Make penny castanets. Fold thick, 2-inch by 6-inch strips of cardboard in half. Help children glue pennies on the inside. Teach them how to squeeze the cardboard until the pennies touch to make a clicking sound.
Give students pennies to use as a tool in simple math problems and counting. Pennies can help kindergartners visualize addition and subtraction problems and be used to practice counting. For example, give them five pennies. Tell them to take away two and count the pennies that are left. Have students do addition problems in pairs or groups. Give each child a different number of pennies. Tell him to count his pennies, then combine his pennies with those of his partner or other group members. Then, they count all the pennies to find their total. Fill different sizes of jars or transparent containers with pennies and do a lesson on estimation where children get to "guesstimate" how many pennies there are in each jar. Compare with the actual number of pennies.