The Many Uses of a Blank Number Line

As the beginning of yet another school year approaches, we’re ramping up review of some of the more troublesome topics from fifth grade, including negative numbers. We spent a lot of time practicing basic addition and subtraction on the number line, and for many problems having a blank number line around has been an invaluable tool for checking our work.

But as we’ve used number lines for these basic activities, they actually have become more of a staple for solving more conceptually difficult problems. As a result, we almost always have a blank number line page on hand right next to our multiplication chart and other math binder tools.

You’ll find number lines come in handy when students are trying to understand a number of different time and distance problems, ratios, conversions and more. To help with these types of problems, I created a collection of number lines with different ranges, including fraction number lines. Double number lines are useful for visualizing ratios, or solving some of the more tricky word problems. There are also several application-specific number lines for time and temperature problems.

Number Lines

You can check them out at the link above, or if you have any other number line ideas, please drop a note in the comment section!