Teaching Percentages Through Tithing

If your family pays a ten percent tithe to a church, or if you give a percentage of income to a charity, you can use this to help your children learn to do percentages. Ten percent is an easy amount to work with, but once they learn, they can transfer the skill to other numbers. This can be paired with other spiritual and academic lessons to create a unit study on giving.

I start this lesson with a craft--making a bank. Any type of container you have handy can be used as a bank. It should be large enough to hold a letter-sized envelope or two. Let your children decorate it any way they like.

Next have a discussion about money. Where do your children get their money? What are they required to do with it? If you haven't already done so, this is a good time to let your children have some responsibilities with their money, perhaps being expected to pay for certain items themselves. (You'll have to increase their allowance to do so.)

Now bring in tithing. Explain what tithing is and how it is used by your church. If possible, take the children to see first hand how their money might be used--show them that everything in the church building costs money, let them visit a church-run food bank, or understand how clergy is paid. It is more fun for children to pay tithing when they know where their money goes. They may develop a sense of ownership and pride in seeing the fruits of their donations.

Now it's time for the math lesson. Ten percent is very easy to teach a child. First give your child ten pennies. Tell him God makes it possible for us to have everything we have, so we give him ten percent of it back. Have him count the pennies. Ask him if he would move one aside to give to God (you might want to place a picture of something that represents religion for him to place his money in front of.) Ask him then to count how much is left over for him to keep. Wow! He gets lots more than God, even though God gives him everything. Tell him that one penny out of every ten is called ten percent and that's how much God gets.

Now begin handing him other sets of ten coins. Initially, make each set all the same type of coin--all nickel or all dimes, for example. Then work up to bills. You can use play money for this activity.

Once your child is comfortable doing this, you can teach him to calcuate on paper, since his money won't always be all in the same denomination. Write a dollar figure on paper. Then show your child how to move the decimal one space to the left. If your child has trouble visualizing this, do it on a flannel board or with cutouts. Then the child can move a flannel decimal, and the previous decimal won't be sitting there confusing him. To add extra thinking, ask him to guess which way to move the decimal and then test to see if the answer makes sense. If he goes the wrong way, he will owe more tithing than the amount of money he received in the first place.

With this skill, he can calculate his tithing on any amount. Give him play money to practice with.

Finish by having him decorate a tithing envelope to keep in his bank. Each time he earns or receives money, he should promptly calcuate the tithing and place the amount in the envelope, which is kept in his bank, before deciding what to do with the rest.