When I went to elementary school in Norway, we still had the equivalent to your cents, nickels, dimes and quarters (coins under 1 dollar). We don’t have that any more in real life although prices on goods and things show the decimals, Having the “decimal coins” made it easy for us to understand that we needed 100 call them 1-cents, 50 of the 2-cents, 20 of the 5 cents, 10 of the 10-cents, 4 of the 25-cents and 2 of the 50-cents. All these coins disappeared one by one. The 50-cent was the last to go in 2011, years before our students were born.
Question: should I show them pictures, make printables of our old coins to make it easier for them to understand the concept of money? Or should I just go on like the books show with today’s coins and bills? Today we have 1 krone (dollar), 5 krone, 10 krone and 20 krone (as our coins), and 50 bill, 100 bill, 200 bill, and 500 bill. Actually we hardly ever use real money anymore, even kids have VISA-cards (debit cards) or we use our cell phones to transfer the amount due anywhere and anytime. All this seems to make teaching the money concept so much harder than when I went to school. We haven’t used checks since the 80’s.