Money amounts can be written using the dollar sign ($) and decimal point. The amount $2.35 means 2 dollars and 35 cents. The digits after the decimal point represent cents out of 100 — a preview of decimal notation. Students learn to write amounts correctly (e.g., $0.07 for 7 cents, not $.7) and to read monetary amounts fluently.
Connect dollars to hundreds and cents to ones-and-tens students already know. Use play money and price tags. Practice reading amounts aloud: $3.48 is 'three dollars and forty-eight cents.' Emphasize the two-digit requirement for cents (7 cents is $0.07, not $0.7).
You already know how to count coins and bills — a quarter is 25 cents, four quarters make a dollar, and so on. Dollars-and-cents notation is simply a compact written way to record any money amount on one line. Instead of writing "3 dollars and 48 cents," you write $3.48. The dollar sign ($) at the front tells you the unit, and the decimal point in the middle is the divider: everything to its left is dollars, everything to its right is cents.
Why does the decimal point work this way? Because there are exactly 100 cents in one dollar — which you can connect to place value you already know. Dollars are like the hundreds column; dimes are like the tens column (10 cents); pennies are like the ones column (1 cent). The two digits after the decimal point represent tens-of-cents and single-cents, just like tens and ones in a regular number. So $3.48 means 3 dollars, 4 dimes (40 cents), and 8 pennies (8 cents).
The trickiest part is amounts less than a dime. Seven cents is $0.07 — not $0.7. The reason: $0.7 would mean 7 dimes, which is 70 cents. The cents column always needs two digits, with a leading zero if there are fewer than 10 cents. Think of it as a two-digit slot: the first digit counts dimes (tens of cents), the second counts pennies (ones of cents). When you only have 7 pennies and no dimes, you write 0 in the dimes slot: $0.07.
This notation is your first peek at decimals — a topic that will expand far beyond money in later grades. For now, you can think of the decimal point as a "dollars/cents boundary marker." Every price tag, receipt, and bank balance you'll ever read uses exactly this system. Fluency here — reading $4.09 as "four dollars and nine cents" without hesitation — makes everyday life cleaner and sets you up for decimal arithmetic ahead.