Number Line

Today while the 2 big kids were at school and Ezra was napping I had a wave of inspiration for a fun way to introduce Cartesian coordinates to kids, starting with a one-dimensional number line. So I did some prep work, and later this afternoon when the kids were home and at a loose end we did a number line activity!

I started by explaining a number line. Then I have each kid a small slip of paper with a "secret" number of dots on it, and told them to get us to guess how many dots they had by marking it on the number line.

Then I have them each several small slips of paper, with varied number of dots on each one in different colors, and had them mark those numbers on the number line, using the coordinating color.

Then I have each kid a sleeve protector with a paper number line inside it, so that they could write in them with dry-erase markers. I then hid four Easter eggs for each kid, each egg containing a different number of raisins. The kids enthusiastically hunted for and found their eggs.

Then they brought their eggs back into the office and counted the raisins in each one, and marked the number for each egg in the matching color dry erase marker in their number line.

Ezekiel seemed to really enjoy this activity, and asked for more after he had finished. Here he proudly displays his first graph of data!

Jane was able to follow along after watching Zeki do it a bit. In the end she did quite a good job too, but was more work out from the exertion and was ready to be done with math for the time being.

I went on to show Zeki how to do addition and subtraction using a number line, which he easily mastered, with great interest.

I was overall very pleased with how this little schooling activity went.