Creative Minds: What did people use for money in the olden days?

In the beginning of this unit, Paxton asked the question " What did people use for money on the olden days? We watched a video called The Story of Money to find some answers. In China in the olden days people valued shells and swapped them for currency. In the beginning, it was quite common to trade perishable items, like food, but the problem was that food items can go rotten and lose its value. In our first experiment, the children tried to figure out how many pieces of fruit and which fruits should be traded for a whole cow. There was no consensus . As we learned that people in the West started using non perishable items like gold nuggets, gold coins and precious metals, paper as "real money that we can see." Although the children were aware of the concept of a credit card, they had no desire to play with this type of invisible currency, and so we excluded it from our chart.