Bring coins into your classroom with lessons, activities, games, and more!
Monthly Mint Trivia: Before a coin reaches your pocket, what is the first step in creating it: striking, designing, or circulating? (Designing—the coin's design must be created and approved before production begins.)
Main Feature: A Concept of Exchange and Value
Coins tell stories about history, economics, art and innovation. The United States Mint offers a variety of free educational resources that bring these stories to life through lesson plans, games, activities, and classroom challenges. Help students strengthen their critical thinking, observation, and memory skills while exploring the fascinating journey of a coin—from design and production to circulation and collection. Discover engaging ways to connect coinage to your curriculum and inspire students in a new way.
- Making Cents (Grades K-2): Students explore the concept of value through a fun, hands-on game that challenges them to create the same monetary amount using different combinations.
- Let’s Go Shopping (Grades K-2): Turn math into a real-world experience as students use coins to make spending decisions and complete a purchase.
- Half Dollar Purchasing Power (Grades 3-4): Help students explore how the value of money changes over time. This lesson uses half dollars to connect history, economics, and real-world purchasing power.
Additional resources from around the web:
- Equal Exchange: Explore how people exchanged goods before modern commerce by evaluating value and representing trades with algebraic expressions.
- Trade Goods: Students examine historical trade practices while learning how people exchanged goods and services before modern commerce.
Classroom Challenge: Have students examine coin images and identify clues about the time, values, and national priorities represented on the coin.
Feature 1: Odds Is In
Feature 2: Cents-able Shopping
Feature 3: Coins For You Booklet
Coin of the Month: 2026 U.S. Constitution Quarter
The obverse design features James Madison, the fourth President of the United States, popularly known as the “Father of the Constitution” for his role in drafting and promoting the foundational document. The inscriptions are “E PLURIBUS UNUM,” “IN GOD WE TRUST,” and “1776 ~ 2026.”
The reverse design depicts Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the Liberty Bell was housed and where both the Declaration and U.S. Constitution were written, debated, and signed. The inscription “WE THE PEOPLE” and the image of Independence Hall together highlight a founding principle laid out in the Constitution: specifically, that our government is grounded in the consent of the governed. The inscriptions are “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,” “WE THE PEOPLE,” “LIBERTY,” “U.S. CONSTITUTION,” and “QUARTER DOLLAR.”
Trivia Answer: 2026 U.S. Constitution Quarter