Clotheslines are interactive number lines.
Students place (and move) cards on a clothesline where they think the number belongs. It is a great activity to show proportional reasoning, precision, equivalency between numbers, and magnitude.
The clothesline draws out student sense-making around relationships between numbers. It can be used across a range of math content, from building students’ number sense to algebra.
Clothesline Math Resources
- Kristen Acosta’s clothesline math cards can be used to explore topics like fractions, decimals, percents, integers, money and expressions.
- Clothesline Math has cards for exploring benchmarks, numbers (and more) as well as an introduction to various ways to set up the clotheslines in your classroom.
- In this blogpost – The Intersection of Fraction Talks & Clothesline Math: Formative Assessment – Jenna Laib writes about a clothesline math activity with fractions. Her description includes her planning, photos of students work, and the connections she made during the class discussion.
- Patricia Helmuth’s Numeracy Adventure Day materials has a clothesline activity with many number representations.
- Learning to Think Mathematically with the Number Line is a great resources for teaching with number lines.
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- Here’s a virtual version of the activity he describes:
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Theresa Wills’ created a virtual template for Clothesline Math using Google Slides.
Theresa’s take on Clothesline Math is give students a range and let them create the number they want to place on the line (as opposed to placing a number they are given). For example, a teacher could set the range of the numberline between 3 and 5. Then ask students to write a number between 3 and 5 on a card and add it to the line. You can encourage students to be creative and try to write a number that they think other students won’t come up with. Another fun way to have students create the number is to give them an image from the FractionTalks website (see below), ask them to color in whatever portion they want, and then place the fraction represented on the clothesline.
A Report on Clothesline Math from an Adult Education Classroom
From Cristina Morales, an adult education teacher at Bronx Community College:
I only did one clothesline [this semester], but I found it really helpful. I used the blank bulletin board outside the classroom. It was easy to pin numbers up and then move them around. I pinned 0, 1, and 2/1 first and set the rule that those had to stay put but all the other numbers could be moved. I printed a set of numbers from one of the websites linked above, and then added in a few more. There were a few numbers in the set that didn’t fit between 0 and 2, and it slowed them down but didn’t stress them out.
I handed each of the number cards to an individual student, but it was primarily a group discussion/activity. The numbers would initially go up pretty quickly, but then we took more time to just look at the number line and check that everything was correct. The students spotted almost all of the mistakes! This was a great group activity; I would totally do it again.
I also gave them a paper handout with the same number line so that everyone could copy the number line after it was done.
This came at the end of the cycle, because I did other lessons with equivalent fractions, decimals and percents first, and then made a big number line with all 3 mixed up.
