We want students to become as involved as possible with their work, but a lot of math is going to be repetitively working similar questions. I believe that giving students any additional degree of control over the questions they’re answering will be helpful to some degree. So, for working with addition of positive and negative integers on a timeline, letting students generate their own problems might add a little interest, and be a little more engaging than just answering the questions in the text. There are a number of ways of doing this, but using two sets of differently colored dice might be fairly easy to put together and appeal to the more tactile-oriented students.
So give each student a set of dice, say six, of two different colors, say red and wooden-colored. Have them roll them then organize them in a line. Your red dice are positive integers and your wooden dice are negative integers.
The dice in the image above would produce the expression:
5 + (-1) + 3 + (-4) + (-6) + 1 =
It might make sense to start with two then move up to four and six (or even use odd numbers as long as you include different colors). You could use a more specialized dice with different numbers of sides, but I think the standard six-sided ones would be sufficient for this exercise.