Hi friends! I am Liam! Today, we are moving from looking at money to actually using it! Have you ever stood at a store counter and wondered if the cashier gave you the right amount of change? Or maybe you are running a lemonade stand and want to be super fast at counting back coins. Today, we are going to become masters of the transaction! We will learn how to estimate, how to round, and how to use our math skills to make sure every penny—or rather, every nickel—is accounted for!I am Maya! Making change is like solving a mini-puzzle. We are going to use subtraction to find the difference between the price of an item and the money we give the cashier. But we will also learn a secret trick called counting up, which makes mental math much faster than trying to do big subtractions in your head. Let us get ready to shop!I am Chloe! In Canada, we have a special rule for cash. Since we do not use pennies anymore, we cannot give back one or two cents in change. That means we have to learn the art of rounding to the nearest nickel. I will show you how to know when to give a little less or a little more so the transaction is fair for everyone.And I am Noah! Whether you are dealing with whole dollars or small cents, the math stays the same. We will work through examples using toys, snacks, and shirts to make sure you are ready for any real-world purchase. Let us start with the most important rule for cash in Canada—the rounding rule!Let us talk about rounding. If you look at a price tag and it says ninety-eight cents, but you are paying with a loonie, how much change do you get? In a perfect world, it would be two cents. But we don’t have pennies! So, we look at the last number. If a price ends in one, two, eight, or nine, we round to the closest ten. If it ends in three, four, six, or seven, we round to the five. So, ninety-eight cents is very close to one dollar, which means the cash price becomes one dollar. If something is sixty-two cents, it is closer to sixty, so the price rounds down. If it is sixty-four cents, it is closer to sixty-five, so it rounds up! This only happens when you use cash. It makes using our nickels much easier for everyone!Now, let us try a whole-dollar transaction. Imagine you are at a garage sale and you find a cool toy dinosaur for seven dollars. You reach into your pocket and find a ten-dollar bill. You give the ten dollars to the person. How much change do you get back? We can do this two ways. The first way is subtraction: ten minus seven equals three. You should get three loonies back! But the second way is even better—it is called counting up. You start at the price, which is seven. Then you count: eight, nine, ten. You counted three times, so you get three dollars back! Counting up is like building a bridge from the price to the payment. Let us try it again. If a shirt costs fourteen dollars and you pay with a twenty-dollar bill, you count up from fourteen: fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. That is six dollars in change!Transactions with cents work the exact same way. Imagine you want to buy a juice box that costs sixty-five cents. You give the cashier three quarters. We know that three quarters is twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five cents. So, what is the change? Seventy-five minus sixty-five is ten. You get a dime back! You can also count up by tens. Start at sixty-five, add ten, and you are at seventy-five. It is like taking one big ten-cent jump on a number line. What if you gave them a whole dollar? Start at sixty-five and count to seventy-five, which is ten cents. Then add a quarter to get from seventy-five to one hundred. So your change is a dime and a quarter. That is thirty-five cents!The best part about being a master of change is that you can always double-check your work. Here is the golden rule: the price of the item plus the change you get back should always equal the money you gave the cashier. If you bought a book for eight dollars and got two dollars in change, then eight plus two equals ten. If you gave a ten-dollar bill, you know the math is perfect! This helps you feel confident when you are at the store. You can even practice this at home by setting up a pretend shop. Use your toys as the items and your family as the customers. Practice rounding the prices to the nearest five cents and then counting back the change out loud. It is a great way to get faster at mental math.Let us do one last tricky one. You are buying a snack for one dollar and twenty-five cents. You give the cashier a five-dollar bill. This sounds like a big subtraction, but let us use our counting up strategy! Start at one dollar and twenty-five cents. Add three quarters to get to two dollars. Now you are at two dollars, and you need to get to five. Two plus three is five. So, your change is three dollars and seventy-five cents! You would get a two-dollar toonie, a one-dollar loonie, and three quarters. Using these steps makes even big numbers feel small and easy to manage. You are not just doing math; you are learning how to handle money like a pro!We have learned how to slide down and climb up with rounding, how to build bridges with counting up, and how to double-check our work with addition. Remember, practice makes perfect! The next time you are at the store with your parents, try to guess the change before the cashier even tells you. See if you can spot the beavers, caribou, and loons as the coins come back to you. You have all the tools you need to be a transaction superstar. Take a look at the practice store in your lesson and see if you can solve the change challenges. We are so proud of your hard work. Happy counting, and we will see you next time!
