With the whole community together, we explored a few different methods. It seemed as though the kids were getting the idea; so I had them do one on their whiteboard to see their individual thinking. The results were quite interesting for a few kids...I wish I had pictures, but I'll show you what they did.
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| This was their "thinking" or "lack of" related to putting together two numbers. |
Since they HAD to use a number line these kiddos decided to put one number to start and make hops to the end. Funny enough when I asked, "How much money would you have if you had $38 in the bank and got $49 more dollars?" After a bit of thought they came up with the the exact dollar amount.
Fast forward to today's math lesson - thinking!!! We had a great discussion about how the most important part of math is thinking about what you're doing and why. I reminded the kids that our strategies are there to help us figure out and understand what we are doing, but we NEED to THINK if what we are doing makes sense. So we rolled up our sleeves and approached addition strategies again. I'm happy to say lightbulbs went on and they were really thinking through different ways to put together numbers.
Don't let number lines get to you and your kids. They are an amazing way to get kids discussing and thinking about numbers. I'm getting ready to dive into finding the difference on a number line, wish me luck!!!
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| I've put together some problems for math notebooks involving number lines, number sense and place value. Adding and subtracting on a number line is "IN PROGRESS". |
