Our 7th and 8th grade first day math activity was a super way to start the year and ease the students back into thinking about the world of numbers. Just imagine an entire class walking around the room with an assigned number (that they don’t know) on their backs. The students were asked to question friends to identify their own number and then line themselves up into a number line. The only guidelines were that the students could ask maximum of 3 “yes or no” questions to a particular student. If the student could not identify the number, the students moved on to the next classmate and asked a second set of 3 questions. “Am I a decimal?”, “Can I be divided into two equal parts?”, “Am I a prime number?”, “Does my equation have a square root?”, and “Oh! I have an exponent?” were just some of the questions we heard. Once they found the value of their number, they used the information to line up from left to right showing least to greatest... just like a human number line! This activity helped the students “reboot” their math vocabulary, reviewed place value with decimals, used critical thinking skills to narrow the span of reasonable answers, and reintroduced operations with positive and negative integers. Yup, all that in just one day!
Mrs. Sheinfeld and Mrs. Bloom
