Don't be negative!

Unless, of course, you are a red bingo chip.

Then, you ARE negative....as in negative integers.

After a few rounds of a card game called "I have- I owe," where we learned about being "in the hole" when we owe more than we have... we expanded our math learning to include adding positive and negative integers.

After counting out the correct number of positive (blue) and negative (red) chips, we figure out the "zero pairs."

The red chips and blue chips together form "zero."

Then, we count the remaining unpaired chips and we prove that +9 + (-4) = +5

We discovered that we can use this idea of "having/ owing" and chips/zero pairs to work out the answers to math problems with harder numbers. 

Adding a negative number to a negative number, or adding a negative and a positive number together, isn't really all that hard once you know what's happening!

This becomes really important when we use it for our checkbooks! We do not want to  have any negative numbers as a balance.

That's why we learned how to estimate our "utility bill" so we can make sure we plan for paying it on time. We need to do the same thing for our rent. 

Our rent is the same every week: $100.00 per week. We got our first utility bill today. It was $92.90 for a month. Utility bills go up and down so we had to figure out a range ($20-$25 per week) for our weekly budget.

What's a budget, you ask? It's a plan for paying bills and saving money. By the end of this year, we are going to be really good at budgeting!