What you need
- Real ₹1 coins, ₹10 notes and ₹100 notes — about fifteen of each if you can
- Five or six household items to sell, with prices written on paper slips
- His bundles of ten sticks, kept nearby for the first game or two
How to play
- 1
Set up the shop
Price five or six things from around the house — a spoon ₹23, a cup ₹41, a comb ₹7. Keep everything under ₹100 to begin with. He is the shopkeeper; you are the customer.
- 2
Pay awkwardly, on purpose
Buy the ₹23 spoon and hand over three ₹10 notes. He has to work out the change. Do not help. This is the whole activity, and it is the moment where the arithmetic becomes his problem rather than a question on a page.
- 3
Make him break a note
Now buy something for ₹7 and pay with a single ₹10 note. To give ₹3 change he must break the ten into ones. Say the sentence out loud as he does it: you are exchanging one ten for ten ones.
- 4
Put the sticks beside the money
The first few times, keep his bundles on the table. When he breaks a ₹10 note, have him untie a bundle at the same time. The two actions are the same action, and seeing them side by side is what carries the idea across from sticks to money.
- 5
Swap roles
Now you are the shopkeeper and he is buying. Being the one who must hand over the right notes is a different problem from giving change, and he needs both.
- 6
Add the hundred later
Once ones and tens are comfortable, introduce ₹100 notes and prices above a hundred. Ten ₹10 notes make ₹100 — have him count them out and swap them for one note, so the hundred is something he built rather than something he was given.
What your child is learning
Honestly stated — this is what the activity actually builds, not a list of everything it might touch.
- That ₹1, ₹10 and ₹100 behave exactly like ones, tens and hundreds
- That giving change is exchanging one ten for ten ones
- Mental arithmetic in the setting where children are already good at it
Why money comes second, not first
Rupee notes look like the perfect way to teach place value: ₹1, ₹10 and ₹100 line up exactly with ones, tens and hundreds. And they are excellent — but not at the start.
A bundle of ten matchsticks is visibly ten times one matchstick. A child can count it and check. A ₹100 note is not visibly a hundred times a ₹1 coin. It is a small piece of paper whose value is a convention he has to be told and believe. Children learning with materials where the ten is genuinely visible end up understanding place value markedly better than children given materials where it is not.
So: sticks first, money second. By the time money arrives, he already knows what a ten is, and the notes simply give him a faster way to handle it.
The one thing children are already good at
There is a well-known finding, including from work with children running market stalls in Kolkata, that the same child can be near-perfect at arithmetic across a counter and lost at the identical sum written on paper. The maths did not change. The setting did.
This activity deliberately borrows that setting. You are not adding difficulty by making it a shop — you are removing it.
Keep to ₹1, ₹10 and ₹100
Leave ₹2, ₹5, ₹20, ₹50 and ₹500 in your wallet for now. They are useful money and terrible place value, because they break the clean ten-times pattern that is the entire thing you are teaching. Bring them in once the pattern is solid, as a puzzle rather than a lesson.
When he gets change wrong
Do not supply the answer. Ask him to count up out loud from the price to what you gave him — twenty-three, then thirty, then forty — and let him hear the gap. Counting up is how shopkeepers actually give change, and it is far easier than the written subtraction that schools reach for first.
Published 17 August 2026 · Suitable for Early schooler, Big kid