Working with money is pretty unavoidable in most job opportunities. This Vocation Station will help your students practice skills associated with handling a money drawer. Our money vocation station focuses on sorting bills and coins in a drawer, counting money from a drawer, rolling coins & wrapping bills, and totaling a drawer at the end of a shift.
If this is your first time visiting our site, you’ve found yourself in the midst of our Independent Work Station Series, AKA – Vocation Stations. These stations help our students practice independence with smaller skills from larger Job Skills training units. Students learn independence, task persistence, task proficiency, along with lots of other companion skills that are essential for different job tasks.
Activities in this station are leveled out. These levels can be assigned to students with specific skill level abilities or used as stepping stones to build up from Level 1 to Level 3. Label your materials and activity instructions according to the levels outlined below. This can help students and support staff more easily set up the station.
This activity may provide a great opportunity to to collaborate with your OT. Bead boxes and tweezer activities have likely grown old for your students reaching adulthood. Mix things up by using coin rolling and bill wrapping for fine motor development with guidance from your Occupational Therapist.
Level 1 – Coins (Sort, Stack, Count, Roll)
Sort
Before we touch the money drawer, we teach our students to sort coins. Toward the end of this level, we will have students sorting the coins into a money drawer. Some of our students may need us to isolate simple sorting first. Students can sort coins on a large surface with or without a guide. The guide may be something that helps them see different areas to sort the coins into or may include a picture or sample of the coin to be matched.
Stack & Count
Once coins are sorted, we teach them to make stacks of coins. With pennies, for example, we teach the students to make stacks of five. This may start with counting five coins out with a visual support. Once a set of five pennies has been counted out, the student can stack the set. After the student has made ten stacks of five pennies, they can place all of the pennies into coin role. Check out the visual support we’ve created to help students with this step below.
Roll
Selecting the correct role for the coin being counted is another skill we may need to specifically teach. Once a student has counted out and stacked a set of coins, they can practice selecting the matching coin role. Teach your student to fold the end of the coin roll, place the coins flat in the roll, and then fold the end of the roll to secure the coins into place. The pages below display the total number of coins needed to fill each coin roll. They are a great visual support for students who can not yet keep track of how many coins they have counted out.
Keep in mind, these basic skills should be taught through direct instruction before you put all of the materials at an independent work station!
Don’t expect your student to figure it out on their own. You can use errorless teaching methods to teach sorting, matching, stacking, and rolling. Once your student masters all of these skills with the appropriate teaching strategies and faded support, you can add Level 1 of the Money Station to this student’s Vocation Stations. Once it is added, this station & level will support your student in maintaining the skills, increasing the speed with which they can complete the activity, and maybe even fading out some of the visual supports they needed to complete the task.
Money Drawer
Once the skills above have been taught and your students have achieved independence, sorting can happen into a money drawer. You may also have your students retrieve the coins from the money drawer as they use the visuals to count and stack coins. Including realistic materials in mock activities and independent work stations can lead toward success in generalizing these skills to real life situations. Start adding in more realistic components as your students are ready for it!
Level 2 – Bills (Sort, Stack, Count, Wrap)
Students graduating to Level 2 will be working on similar skills to those they learned in Level 1. Instead of coins, they will be using bills. Bills present their own OT-supported fine motor instruction. They also give us a change to work on a new visual performance skill: orienting the bills face up and in the same direction. You will have some students who are ready for this and others who may need a pass. Just don’t forget to consider it when you make your plans to directly teach this skill before adding it to your independent work stations.
Sort
Just like our coins, we may want to begin by teaching our students to sort bills into piles before they use cash drawer. If they are dealing with a large stack of bills to sort, it may be valuable to sort the bills into piles on the counter before placing them in the cash drawer. A lot of cashiers sort bills on top of the cash drawer before lifting the levers to place cash in the slots – it saves time. Also, that lever that keeps the bills in place is yet another opportunity to work on fine motor skills and managing a few different materials at once.
Stack and Count
Once the bills are sorted, students can learn to count bills by creating uniform stacks and wrapping them with a label. Just like the coins, students can use a visual support to count out the proper amount of bills for each label. Check out the visual supports we’ve created into a bind-able visual support book for this Vocation Station.
Wrap
Lastly, students can wrap their pre-counted stacks with the appropriate label. Don’t forget to teach students to select the correct label according to the bill being wrapped. Wraps may be organized neatly in your station or they may be mixed in a single bin. Consider how the wraps will be stored in a real life situation, probably in a messy drawer. Use this as an opportunity to teach students to sift through a variety of wraps and select the correct one.
Once students learn all of the skills to this point, it may be time to teach them what to do with left over bills and coins. It is rare that a cash drawer will have the exact amount of money to fill wraps and rolls to the designated amount. Those loose bills and coins will have to be handled and counted. For now, teach them to set loose money aside, still separated by value. We will teach them how to add it to the total in Level 3.
Level 3 – Count the Drawer
Now that all of the bills and coins are rolled and wrapped, our students on Level 3 can focus on counting the money in the drawer. Student on this level should be able to complete the previous steps and then fill out a sheet declaring how much money was in the drawer, including the wrapped/rolled money as well as the loose money. Your student may need to break this full activity into more than one session, but ideally we will work to decrease the time it takes for our students to complete the full scope of this activity.
To total the drawer, our students complete a worksheet outlining each bill and coin, the number of wraps/rolls created, and the value of each wrap/roll. Students can then do multiplication to determine the value of each coin and bill. Once the value of the wraps and rolls are the determined, the worksheet provides a space to count up loose bills and coins. All totals are recorded in a single column to make adding the total value of the drawer a little easier. Students may or may not need to use a calculator for this Level, you decide! This is a great, realistic way to help our students incorporate calculator skills into realistic activities.
You can purchase this worksheet we use in our TpT store. Purchase it separately or in a bundle with our bind-able visual support for this work station.
One More Skill to Consider
Let’s not forget the cashier’s responsibilities when they start a shift. If you’ve never worked as a cashier, you may not be aware of this. When you get your drawer of money, you should be notified of how much money is in the drawer. It is the cashier’s responsibility to confirm the amount in the drawer is accurate. Otherwise, they may be responsible for the difference. Even worse, they may be accused of stealing. You may want to give your students a full drawer and an amount expected to be in the drawer. Then, you can have them count to confirm the total. They would not go through the process of wrapping bills for this. They can still use the visual support book and the drawer totally sheet to count each denomination.
Have your students give it a try and prepare them to rock the cash register!
