Sometimes resources for younger students can be useful for lower secondary age students, see for example Mark Robinson’s Numberlines from the old Ambleside Primary School site which includes an option to display a number line from -5 to 5.
For another excellent number line resource see J Barrett’s Numberline Jump Maker on ictgames.com. I often recommend that students sketch a number line to help with addition and subtraction problems and very clear resources like these can really help. Teacher Resources on Line includes a Big Number Line under Basic Materials for display on a classroom wall
Games can be an excellent way to practise with negative numbers see for example games such as Connect 3 from Nrich and Tic Tac Go, a Wisweb applet.
Further resources include exercises from Trinity School in Nottingham (under Number) and Interactive Resources from CIMT (see unit 3, 3.3 on Negative Numbers and Unit 15, 15.1 and 15.2 for operations with negative numbers in the tutorials section).
There are many excellent resources on TES, the resource collections includes a section on Topic Specials which includes 10 of my favourite resources on Negative Numbers.
Hai, I’m Busyrah from Indonesia…I would like to translate your posting about negative number to Indonesian language and post in my blog..May I? thank you very much.
Please do Busyrah, I’m glad it’s useful.
Thank you for your post about negative numbers. No matter how much my students have done, I realize that some of them really need more practice. The one I really like the one where they drag the number line to find the answer.
I have a question for you….my students are stuck in making the transition from thinking about subtracting a positive number from a negative number as adding a negative. Which is fine….except our equations are getting so complicated that all this crossing out and rewriting is a mess. That mess is causing them to make mistakes because it all gets jumbled. Do you have any experience with that? How/what do you use to help them sort all that out?
Marsha I find many students like to draw quick sketches of number lines to help them ‘see’ the problem. I tend to show them lots of diagrams and compare for example -3 – 10 and -3 + 10, also point out that -3 – 10 cannot possibly be the same as -3 – (-10). I would also show the equivalence of say -3 + 2 and 2 – 3. Rather than crossing out I would write an equivalent statement on the next line.