Up & Down the Number Line

Dear Family,

Our class is starting a new math unit called Up and Down the Number Line. In this unit, your child will start to work with positive numbers (like +1, +2) and negative numbers (like -1, -2), We'll put together combinations of positive and negative numbers, which we'll call changes, to see what results we get. Most of teh work is done through games, some of which involve imaginary trips in an elevator, up and down a skyscraper.

For example, one challenging problem that your child might do is this:

I got on the elevator at some floor in my building. I moved up two floors, then got down three floors, and I ended up on the fifth floor. What floor did I start on?

It takes some thinking to solve this. We'll do many problems like this in class, and the children will invent some of their own problems about elevator trips. Sometimes your child will brign these games home to teach you. As you play together, talk with your child about his or her strategies for thinking about and keeping track of the changes. You and your child should feel free to invent your own problems as you play.

In about two weeks, the class will be making graphs of elevator trips. To prepare for this, they will be looking at graphs from newspapers and other sources that show things that change over time, such as temperatures, heights, or population. If you can, please help your child find one or two graphs to bring to school.

Using numbers to describe how something changes is a very important part of mathematics. Thinking about ups and downs helps children learn how to describe mathematical changes. In the future, they'll use these skills in both science and math as they describe and graph how things change.