Number lines continued...

Day 2 of number line exploration was... interesting.

Following on from looking at horizontal number lines - and exploring, discussing etc. the relationship of numbers to each other as well as doing a whole pile of thinking and explaining activities in our activity pack - I really thought that vertical number lines would be a snap. After all, we were only rotating the things a quarter turn.

Here's what really happened...

Hmmm....

another hmmmmm...

 

Very creative but not
quite there :)

So we repeated our round the room view and discuss - we looked at the one and only different number line and compared results ...

... and again a chorus of "ohhhh"s echoed around the room as children scurried to fix their number lines saying to each other, "See, I told you it was..." and "I knew we'd done something wrong because what was going to come after negative 1?"

I count this as a success. My kiddies are discussing and explaining and are getting used to the idea that it's ok to make mistakes. :) I've got to say I love this kind of Math!!

We moved on to the white board to see if we could figure out where to put numbers on different number lines with no scale markings. Do you know what the best part of this was?

EVERYONE wanted to try!! There was no worrying about getting it wrong or being embarrassed. They wanted to come up and try - and then explain why they put the number where they did. It was wonderful - and they ALL explained their choices in terms of numbers!!

"I chose to put the 10 here because the number line goes from 0 to 20 and 10 is half of 20 so I figured out where the halfway mark was and that's where I put the 10."

or

"Well, this number line goes to 100 and I know that 10 is a lot closer to 0 than to 100. I looked at the halfway mark and sort of made spaces in my head to figure out how close to the 0 to put the 10."

HUGE SMILE!!!

Another child had already filled in the 50
and this student is trying to figure out
where the 10 should go.

These were the three guesses - each
child explained why they made their
choice.

Then we filled in the scale
to see who was closest!
They were really all quite
good, I thought!!

So... an awesome Math lesson. The time flew by and the kiddies loved every second of it!! We even had time to look at some thermometers and start to discuss different scales.

We continue tomorrow - learning to add and subtract on a number line. We've pulled out our froggy number lines and are ready to HOP!!!

Happy Thursday tomorrow, everyone :)