Yard Sale Board Game [Counting Money]

It’s yard sale season, which is a wonderful time to work on counting money! I drummed up a game to play with my son that works on the following:

1. Spending your money wisely (e.g. if you have $0.30, you can buy one thing for $0.30 or three things for $0.10).
2. Saving your money to buy bigger ticket items.
3. Exchanging money (e.g. ten dimes can be exchanged for $1.00).
4. Making change (e.g. you buy something that costs $0.75 and pay with a one dollar bill; how much change do you get back?).

What you need to play:

Poker chips (each player uses a different color as gamepieces)

The game board and money cards (download a PDF here)

Funny money in $1.00, $5.00, and $10.00 increments (you can download some here)

Lots of U.S. coins

Yard sale pricing stickers

Prep:

Once you’ve taped the game board together and cut apart the money cards, stick one yard sale pricing sticker on each item on the board (use only a few $5 and $10 stickers).

Objective:

Buy as many items as you can. The player with the most items purchased (i.e. poker chips on the board) when the entire board is filled is the winner.

Rules:

Play alternates between players. We played with two players, but I think you can play with as many as four. Each player gets $1.00 in funny money to start. Then, they draw from the pile of cards.

Whatever amount of money on the card is given to the player and he/she can purchase as many items as they’d like until they are out of money. A gamepiece (i.e. poker chip) is placed on all of the items that are purchased.

A purchase should be made during each turn, unless the player does not have enough money to buy any of the remaining items on the board, or they get the “Oh No” card. In which case, a gamepiece is removed and play resumes with the next player drawing a card from the draw pile.

Before we played, we read a great Mercer Mayer book. This got my son in the spirit of yard saling!

Then we both put on our game faces and raided my husband’s bowl of pocket change. It was a buying frenzy at first, but as the low-ticket items were purchased, the pace slowed. Now, we forced to “save” our money to see who would get the remaining few $5 and $10 items. This was a lot of fun and although it was intended just to work on counting money, there were loads of other lessons built right in.

I think we’re both in the mood to bargain hunt at next weekend’s yard sales now!


CREDIT: I downloaded the currency clip art from TeacherFiles.com.