Article: ANA Coins in the Classroom Program: Revie

[Art]

I separated the review from the syllabus to make a smaller and easier to read file.

 

Review

 

The Seminar was outstanding. All of the ANA personnel involved were extremely knowledgeable and well prepared. Gail Baker, Director of Education, led the instructional team and was excellent at quickly forming our diverse group of teachers into a friendly, sharing, interactive group of learners. Lane Brunner brought he extensive love and knowledge of Numismatics to the class, along with his polished classroom presentation skills. Cathy Scaife demonstrated a love and skill for using ancient coins in the classroom that certainly warrants ACE's Harlan J. Berk Prize for Teacher Excellence awarded to her last year.

 

As you can see from the syllabus, the ANA and a number of Numismatic Companies have provided us with not only lesson plans that revolve around the use of coins, but also the materials and resources to implement and improve upon these plans. We should have no trouble adapting the plans to our classrooms and creating new and more extensive plans as our own expertise increases. The ANA is creating a list-serve network to allow teachers who have attended Coins in the Classroom to continue to share ideas, lesson plans, and other resources. To aid us in having access to resources, the ANA has given each student a six-month membership. This will allow full use of the ANA Library and research facilities.

 

The Seminar provided a broad-brush education on Money and Numismatics enabling those participants who were not Numismatists to quickly understand the basics of coins, collecting, Numismatic terminology, and the minting processes. An informative presentation about the origins of money and the history of coins provided useful information to even the experienced collectors in the group. A vast array of coins and currencies was made available for us to inspect during the lessons. This helped each of us to better understand the discussions about design, metals, and the minting processes. Emphasis was placed on using the coins to reflect the history of their times. Discussions about things like resource management during the Second World War, accompanied by steel cents and silver nickels are sure to get the attention of any student.

 

We simulated an Ancient Coin classroom lesson by having each student clean and attribute 3 ancient Roman coins. It was an interesting experience. One of my coins is still being soaked. The other two were processed enough to be attributable. One of my coins, a Diocleation from 295-299 was not present in the CD or online photo databases. So I have a less than common coin. WOW! I'll send it to the online database folks so they can photograph it.

 

There was a lot of discussion about the use of coins in lesson plans for particular subjects and grade levels. A number of the students had already used coins as part of their lesson plans. Some were very extensive integrated plans using a single coin or grouping to address material in Social Studies, Language Arts, Math, and Science. Other plans were simpler such as the use of coins in a science project to familiarize students with the use of scales and balances.

 

Overall the Seminar was a wonderful learning experience and one that I shall never forget. I believe that many of the teachers have formed life-long alliances and will continue to share information with the growing list of graduates. My thanks to the ANA, the other sponsors, and to all the wonderful teachers with whom I had the privilege of sharing this past holiday week.

[mmarotta]

The challenge is to get past "numismatics" and even to get beyond "history you can hold in your hand." The history is easy to use, of course. I just wrote an article for The Celator about the University of Michigan's classical studies program. The professor who teaches Cinema gave me a good quote about using coins to bring the reality of these people to the classroom. This was Nero. This was Alexander.

 

I teach science on the weekends at the Ann Arbor Hands-on Museum. We have physicists on banknotes (and mathematicians on stamps). To me, one interesting fact about coins is that a US Five Cent Nickel weighs 5 grams. So, if you ever need five grams, there you are.

 

The light-shifting of new paper money and the UV treatments are other examples of "coins and science."

 

One of the displays is a recreation of an early-1900s general store. The old cash register is one way to challenge a kid to come up with ways to make a dollar from change. How many ways are there?

[Art]

Change for a dollar was always one of the first exercises we'd use in programming schools. It's fun to program, of course the addition of the SBA and SAC as "circulating" coins changes the problem a bit.

 

How many actual combinations are there of circulating US coins that can produce $1.00 exactly?

 

Circulating coins for this exercise are: cent, 5 cent, 10 cent, 25 cent, 50 cent, one-dollar SAC, one dollar SBA.