Unit 7, Lesson 5
Using Negative Numbers to Make Sense of Contexts
Grade 6
Preparation
Lesson Narrative
In this lesson, students are introduced to conventions for using signed numbers to represent money spent and received, as well as inventory gained and lost. Students examine a table detailing the inventory and value in dollars of items sold at a hardware store. They make sense of what positive and negative numbers mean in relation to the inventory (items purchased or sold) and also in relation to the items’ value in dollars (MP2).
An optional activity about the inventory in a vending machine offers additional practice interpreting signed numbers in context.
Since students do not operate on signed numbers in this grade, this lesson is simply an introduction to the convention of using signed numbers to represent a change in money or a change in inventory. Students will study addition and subtraction of signed numbers in a future course.
- Interpret a table of signed numbers that represent how a quantity changed.
- Recognize that signed numbers can be useful to represent changes in a quantity in opposite directions, e.g., money received and money paid, inventory bought and inventory sold, etc.
Let’s make sense of negative amounts of money.
Required Preparation
None