This lesson will be the first of six lessons guiding students in constructing the abstract concepts necessary to understand adding positive and negative integers.
It is designed for adult learners (or middle school or older) who are not fluent with using numbers. A real life lesson will be included in this series of lessons-Budgeting.

For many adult students, positive and negative integers are an example of when math “keeps changing the rules.” This is the fourth of six lessons guiding students in constructing the abstract concepts necessary to understand adding positive and negative integers.
This lesson will review previous knowledge about negative numbers and teach adding integers with the same sign. The previous lesson focused on “real life situations” and this will teach expressing those real life situations on a number line. The actual problems will still be adding integers of the same sign because of the prevalence of confusion with adding two negative numbers.

One in five students in the U.S. are estimated to have learning and attention issues. Specific learning disabilities can include dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia, while attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) centers on an individual's challenge with focus. Learning and attention issues often co-occur. These brain-based differences are not the result of low intelligence, poor vision, or hearing. Although young people will not ‘grow out’ of their learning or attention challenge, the appropriate, evidence-based programs and strategies can support a learner to become successful in school, work, and life.

It is particularly important that these interventions occur early on (ideally prior to third grade) to provide students the support they need at critical periods of learning and development. While learning and attention challenges affect all learners from every income level and across all races, genders, and ethnicities, students who are Indigenous, Black, Brown, living in poverty, or learning English are more often over- or under-identified with specific learning disability diagnoses.

Across the country, educators are beginning to expand RTI to secondary schools. Middle, junior, and high schools are very different places from elementary schools and, in fact, different from each other. Whether or not your school is presently implementing RTI, you will want to be prepared to ask and answer key questions regarding the opportunities RTI presents in high school settings.

Informational resources and tools available to guide those who wish to establish or strengthen an Response to Intervention program in grades K-5.

In this assignment, students will create a fictional person with a disability, describe how their needs could be met in a classroom setting, and work with a partner to discuss possible challenges and opportunities. There is an option to turn the material created in this assignment into an assignment as a practice of regenerative Open Educational Resources and Open Pedagogy.