The Balloon Man and His Wife

In covering Positive and Negative numbers this year, we played a game in which a man in a hot air balloon travels up and down on a number line. If he gets to zero, the man reaches his wife awaiting him on a cliff, if he reaches -6 the man is eaten by Alligators waiting for him below.

To play the game one player is the alligators, while the other is the balloon man. One player rolls the dice, and can choose to add either negative or positive of the number, moving the man in the balloon accordingly.

The alligators then got to roll, and sent the man either up or down based on their rolls.

Students then wrote down the amounts as they rolled them, then checked the problem to see if the number pairs ended up being zero.

This lesson provided an excellent opportunity to learn about zero pairs, and visualize them. We added ones by drawing filled in boxes, and negative ones by drawing empty boxes.