Presidents' Day Art & Math with Quarters

Here's a fun way to learn about quarters for both math and art. 

I actually started thinking about this awhile ago when I drove by this wall art in the neighborhood.

The lesson starts out with the kids creating the background so that it can dry by the time they are ready to glue on their coin rubbings. This background is wet on wet watercolor.

Then students get to the real work. Using my favorite PRANG colored pencils, they rub the heads side and the tail side of various quarters, noticing all the details. Working in small groups, and using small magnifying glasses, each group records everything they see on their coins on a record sheet.

Later we record their observations in chart form and discuss them. We actually do this for all coins at another time and have the charts to compare what kids find on them all.

Quarters are such great coins to study since they have started being minted for each state. Depending on the age and skills of your students you can decide how much research to have them do as they discover phrases on some of the state quarters. For example, the Hawaii 2008 coin has Hawaiian words that kids can look up on the computer to find the translation. For those of you who are curious, the Hawaiian translation is "The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness." Nice, huh??!!

You can also decide whether to have kids label their rubbings and how detailed to be. Another option is to have students color in each state on a U.S. map to match the color of their rubbing:

I am getting ready to this with 2nd graders and will share some of their art results as they are available. I should mention that I also plan to extend this lesson in math to augment place value/tens and ones work that these students are doing.

Happy Presidents' Day -- hope you enjoy celebrating on your 3 day weekend, too!!!