Imaginary Numbers?

Okay, a second time I’m doing 2 posts in one day–but really, it won’t happen often!

Those of you who are mathematicians will know what I am referring to with that title–those of you who aren’t may not.
The bottom line is that my kids can’t wait for math tomorrow because they are going to learn about them. We are working on their sense of number, and I happen to believe that the more kids have the big picture, the more they are able to manipulate things within subsets of that big picture. Today’s agenda include talking about real and imaginary numbers–but we didn’t get to it.

I wish I’d had a video of the kids face as I finished one sentence (about consecutive numbers, which is what we had been working on) and then said, “Well, we’ll have to do real and imaginary numbers tomorrow, cause it’s past time–you guys have to go.” They were so disappointed we didn’t get to talk about imaginary numbers. I can’t imagine THAT! (as a kid, I mean…)

So what do you know about imaginary numbers?  Any good resources out there for a bunch of fifth grade geeks? If we don’t get to it tomorrow, I’d like to have some resources they could pore over at home. Thanks!