Beaded Number Lines

I know I don't post math ideas very often. I guess I just feel like most of us probably do a lot of the same things already in math. It's also never been my strongest subject area. Especially with the little ones-half the year our objectives are counting and number recognition-I run out of ideas for creative ways to teach those things.

Anyway, I try to knock out professional development hours over the summer-no sub plans necessary. :) And I learned about this idea that I had an opportunity to try with my summer school kiddos; it worked really well! It's a beaded number line. I ordered all the supplies from Amazon for a little over $20 total. I got one bag each of 1,000 red and 1,000 white beads. I also ordered shoelaces that I ended up cutting in half. You tie the end without the aglet, put on 20 beads alternating 5 at a time in different colors. It looks like this:

(I know one has the colors backwards-I need to fix that one).

So how do you use it. I had the students make a circle in whole group so I could assess everyone's work by looking around. With my Kinders I asked them to just count out a number and they moved the beads to the opposite side. We went around the circle and each student chose a number for the class to make 1-20. Even the week I had this group there were students who were catching on to the fact they could use 5 at a time instead of counting individually-that's a big skill with the littles.

With older students you could have them put it on a piece of paper and label one number say 11 and then ask them to show where 17 would be. Or they could draw the representation of numbers with the red and white.

An easy tool that I can't wait to use regularly in my math talks with my class next year.

Now on to making Rekenreks with my leftover beads! :)