The purpose of this activity is for students to find coin combinations that have values of 100 cents and to make connections between coin collections that have the same value. Students are invited to connect the value of nickels to that of dimes and relate their understanding of place value to represent 100 cents with dimes (MP7). In the next activity, students learn that 100 cents is the same as one dollar.

• “How could you have used what you know about nickels to figure out how many dimes you needed?” (For every 2 nickels, we needed 1 dime.)
• “How many pennies would you need in order to have the same value? Explain.” (100 because a penny is worth 1 cent, so you need 100 to make 100 cents.)
• “What do you notice about each coin collection? What do you wonder?” (I notice it takes more nickels than quarters or dimes to have the same value. It takes only 4 quarters. It takes 10 dimes, just like it takes 10 tens to make 100. Is 100 cents the same as a dollar?)

The purpose of this activity is for students to find combinations of coins with values of 100 cents and to understand that a dollar is a unit of money with the same value as 100 cents. They add within 100 by grouping like coins, using a ten, or counting on. They find coin combinations that add up to 100 cents or one dollar and write the leftover amount as cents. This work builds on students’ understanding of a hundred.

• “How did you find the total value of the coins?”
• “How could you say how much money _____ has, using dollars and cents?”

• “I noticed that when you were creating a coin collection for Priya, there were different solutions.”
• “How is it possible that everyone represented the same amount of money?” (Different numbers of different coins can show the same amount.)
• Invite students to share different combinations of coins they used to make $1.
• Share and record responses.