Saturday, May 28, 2011

Understanding The Number Line

A while back I tried to introduce the number line to Selena, but she would have nothing to do with it. She did however love to graph. I just felt that the number line would take her further in her math so on Friday I reintroduced it to her. We first started with the 1 addition facts, from 1=0 through 1+9. I could see the light bulb go on so I moved on to the 2 addition facts.

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This time I gave Selena the pen and she had to work through all the problems on her number line by herself. At first it was a little confusing, so I showed her another way of counting her way up the number line by numbering the spaces on top. Again the light bulb went on, and she was able to do all the problems I had on the board.

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She took it one more step though and showed me at the end of this exercise the pattern in her answers. I thought that was pretty bright when she caught that.

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Just to make sure she was indeed understanding what she was doing and not just finding the pattern in the answers, I mixed up the equations. She worked through each of them on her own.

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No longer being confused or scared of the number line, I feel that Selena’s math skills can do nothing more then improve now. Subtraction will be our next hurdle using the number line, after a bit more practice with addition.

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6 comments:

  1. Go, Selena!

    Do you have stairs in your house? You might like this activity from my sister's blog in a few months:

    http://growingwisely.com/2011/05/26/learning-activity-addition-and-subtraction-with-negative-numbers/

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  2. Yay, Selena :)

    And good for you, Debbie, for knowing when to reintroduce the skill!

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  3. You know I dont think I ever once had the number line actually explained to me! LOL! I will certainly use it for DD since I think it would help her to catch on faster. Thanks for sharing!

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  4. This is great exercise. I completely backed out of math for now, since my husband has convinced me that it's not an essential skill for 4 year olds. I know that Anna is picking up math very easily, so I am just waiting to take it up more when she is in K.

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