Money Box activity

(Goblin is 29 months)

Hublet is all man when it comes to coins. I normally try to avoid using stereotypical descriptions of male and female 'actions' but there is no getting away from the fact that I do not know a single woman who feels the need to empty their pockets and purse of all their coins and leave them lying in piles around the house, and yet it seems a very common and accepted practice among my male friends. I gave up panicking about the choking hazard in every room of the house a long time ago.

Next to Hublet's side of the bed there is a giant jar, and every night without fail Hublet empties his change from his pocket into the jar - including £1 and £2 coins - so there is a lot of money in that jar. We used to have a computer next to the bed, and Goblin would regularly open the jar and stuff the coins into the CD slot of the computer.
A few days ago Goblin discovered an old money box that I had on a shelf. He took it to the coin jar, emptied a bunch of coins onto the bed and started slotting them into the money box.

This is a great activity for fine motor skills and accuracy. It is slightly more advanced than putting spagetti or kebab sticks into a parmesan cheese shaker, because you need to manipulate the coin to the right angle to fit in the slit. And it gives the child an opportunity to handle money. You can talk about the quantity of the coins while the child plays.

I took the moneybox and some of the coins down stairs and put it on Goblin's shelf. It was the first thing he went to the next morning, and he has taken it off the shelf and played with it a lot since then. Its funny how the simple activities often prove the most popular.  

A nice extension for this activity would be to ask your toddler to find specific coins to put in the slot. 

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