Hot and Cold Cubes Positive and Negative Counters by mrpaine

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

Learning addition and subtraction of positive and negative numbers can be a challenge to many students. Traditionally, students model using a number line and arrows indicating magnitude and direction, however, this representation has its short comings. An alternative approach is to model with positive and negative counters. A hook activity for this is using a story called Chef's Cubes, by Interactive Mathematics (http://mathimp.org/), which relates traditional counters to hot and cold cubes used to control the temperature of a magical soup. I have had great success in using this hook activity but I do not have any manipulative for students to get their hands on - they are limited to drawing + or - signs on their paper. This model is to overcome that and get the cubes in their hands so they can make a richer connection between the story and how to effectively model addition and subtraction of positive and negative numbers through the use of hot and cold cubes.