Above and Below Zero

This Instructional Activity is a part of the Lesson 1, Unit 7, Grade 6. The purpose of this task is to understand that there are natural mathematical questions about certain contexts for which there are no answers if we restrict ourselves to positive numbers. The idea is to motivate the need for negative numbers and to see that there is a natural representation of them on the number line. This task is not about operations with signed numbers, but rather why we extend our number system beyond positive numbers. Students reason abstractly and quantitatively when they represent the change in temperature on a number line.