Penny Activities for Kids

April 20, 2026 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

May 23 is Lucky Penny Day, and while the penny isn’t being produced in American anymore, we can still celebrate the pennies we have left with some fun penny activities.

You don’t have to use pennies for most of the activities in the penny lab from STEAM Powered Family (except for the experiment about cleaning pennies) so you can use whatever coins you have on hand or whatever small coins are available in your country. I love the bridge building activity, which I think would be fun for grownups to try as well.

In addition to cleaning pennies, you can also try to turn a penny green with this activity from STEAMsational.

Every Star is Different has a printable Montessori inspired pack of penny activities. There’s a hundred board using pennies, math activities using pennies, writing practice, coin sorting and more.This is a paid resource that’s more than 100 pages and you can purchase it here.

I love these easy penny spinners from Surviving a Teacher’s Salary because kids can decorate them and then play with them. You could also try making them with different coins and see which one spins the longest.

Play penny shuffleboard with this printable board game from Education.com.

If you’re willing to sacrifice some of your precious pennies to art, these little wreaths I found on Pinterest are super cute and would be a fun Christmas ornament. The originals were made with coins from the child’s birth year, which adds on the activity of getting kids to sort through the pennies to find their year.

And of course you can do coin rubbings and pressings in playdough and compare different designs on pennies if you have a collection with a few different design options. Or just give kids a pile of coins and have them sort by type and then count all the pennies (my daughter used to love doing that with her piggy bank!).

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Five Senses Crafts and Activities for Preschool

One of the subjects that’s often covered in preschool is learning about the five senses. Understanding our senses helps us describe the world around us and our experience in it, and it’s fun to explore the senses in different ways.

Rock Your Homeschool has a great free printables pack having to do with the five senses. I love the foldable activity shown above because it emphasizes that the way we really experience our senses is through our brains. They also have a sensory scavenger hunt printable, which doesn’t include taste but has the rest of the senses included.

Of course we don’t really want kids tasting things they find outside (unless you happen to have fruit or vegetables growing nearby) but I like the way Hands on Teaching Ideas handled it by including “something an animal would eat” on their five senses scavenger hunt.

Sea of Knowledge has lots of ideas for things to do with preschoolers to learn about the five senses, as well as this free with email signup template for making a five senses craft (you could also trace the child’s hands instead of using the hands in the template if you like).

Use a potato head toy you probably already have to play a five senses game with the download from A Little Pinch of Perfect. You could do the same thing on paper with a potato (or human body) shape and color on the different sense organs.

Simple Everyday Mom has a cute set of senses puppets you can print and play with, or use for different projects and crafts.

Preschool Packets has a whole set of posts dealing with teaching the five senses (the one linked here is for hearing but the rest are linked within that post), which includes a great idea for making shakers with kids to explore the sense of hearing.

Tim’s Printables has some cute five senses printables where kids can match the image to the sense you’d use to explore it. There’s also a body to label but I think there’s only a male version.

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