Real Number System Graphic Organizer

While looking for inspiration, I found a lot of creative illustrations of the real number system.  But, I was looking for something a little different.  I wanted my students to add the information. 

And, for my older students, I wanted them to even discover some of the information themselves before we added it to the graphic organizer as a class. 

So, I created my own real number system graphic organizer that would meet all my needs.

For my Algebra 2 students, I plan to give my students strips of numbers.  Each strip will correspond to one of the subsets of the real numbers.  It will not be labeled however.  I want them to take these numbers and try to figure out how they nest on to the graphic organizer. 

I’m hoping that they will discover for themselves that every natural number is a whole number, every whole number is an integer, etc. 

I ran across this in a pile of math resources I was given.  Something to think about:

I am using interactive notebooks with my Algebra 1 and Algebra 2 students.  So, I plan to have students glue the real number system graphic organizer in their INBs.

I want the students to outline the boxes with colored pencils to emphasize the fact that everything inside the red box is an integer, even the whole numbers and natural numbers. 

So far, I just have definitions (Frayer Model) and a few examples.  Obviously, my final draft and sample notebook will be neater.  And, the rational numbers and irrational numbers are only a different color because I already had some printed on colored paper. 

In real life, they would either be all white or all different colors.  Trying to overcome my perfectionism here…

In 2013, I used the same graphic organizer for the real number system, but we filled it out slightly differently. It felt good to be able to reuse something from last year instead of creating something entirely new from scratch!

I ended up creating another version of the real number system graphic organizer.

You might also be interested in a graphic organizer I created for the subsets of the real numbers.