I chose to use PowerPoint to teach first graders the basics about money.  I chose this topic because I’ve worked with first graders before who were just beginning to learn about money.  Though many of them understood it and could add the different coin values together to determine the value of the money, there were still many that really struggled with it.  I saw many students who still thought that each coin was worth one cent so the amount of money that they would count would be the number of coins they had in front of them.  Creating an interactive introductory lesson for the students would be something that they will remember and be able to build off of as they continue to try to grasp and use the information. 

The presentation covers the value of the penny, nickel, dime, quarter and dollar and teaches them how to add the coins together to determine the amount of money.  The presentation begins with a video from Emedia which introduces all the concepts in a fun way using muppet type characters that are opening a store and need to organize their money and count how much they have.  I continue to reiterate the information that the video presented so that the concepts are remembered and more fully understood.   There is a mini quiz at the end of the presentation to make sure that the students fully comprehended the information.

I plan to use the PowerPoint presentation in the classroom as an interactive lesson in which we go through it as a class and discuss each slide.  The students will be able to take turns clicking on the buttons that connect to the next slide so that they feel a part of the lesson and which will encourage the students to be enthusiastic about what they are learning because all first graders want to participate in class.

What I thought worked well were the images and text.  I tried to make everything simple and organized so that the students could understand it easily.  The slides linked easily and gave it something new other than just transitioning from slide to slide in the order they were made.  The movie worked well and starts automatically when the slide begins.  What didn’t work well was the sound.  I only created one Correct slide and one Try Again slide and connected all the answers to the appropriate slide.  The sound and animations worked the first time those slides were viewed but on the next question if you got the answer correct it would take you to that slide without the sound or the animation.  I had hoped that the sound would work each time that slide was visited yet I could not get that to work.