math worksheets

Terrific new site:

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unfriendly worksheets, part 2

from A Guide to Learning English:

Rule number 2: Be aware of the difficulties of cultural references!

The following text is the first part of the introductory paragraph to a question about car speed:

"The police used to measure the speed of cars on the road by having two PCs some distance apart using a stopwatch. One of them would stand and wave as a car reached him. When the wave was seen by the second PC a stopwatch was started. As the car passed the second PC, the stopwatch was stopped."

The question itself read:

"Is the car exceeding the maximum speed limit in Britain?"

The ESL student who asked for my help with this question was puzzled how a personal computer could stand and wave. He also had no idea what the maximum speed limit is in Britain.

I would like to know how two personal computers can stand some distance apart and use a stopwatch.

unfriendly worksheets

source:
A Guide to Learning English

Math Mammoth

Crimson Wife recommends the Math Mammoth books.

SAT/ACT Math and Beyond

Vicky S sent me notice of a workbook Stephen Wilson has posted on his web site: SAT/ACT Math and Beyond: Problems Book by Qishen Huang.

The book is listed here. I've just ordered the solution manual, which Dr. Huang says is highly detailed (460 pages for the manual, 131 for the workbook). That's critical for those of us teaching ourselves, and not easy to find.

Dr. Huang estimates that 20% of Chinese high school graduates can work 90% of these problems, which he says are not as difficult as those on China's SAT equivalent.

And...on the subject of workbooks, I've emailed Myrtle, who is using the NEM Workbooks (New Elementary Mathematics Syllabus D 1 and New Elementary Mathematics Syllabus D 2).

Meanwhile, I have done no math at all this summer, because I am busy reading C's massive Summer Assignment list, all 2549 pages of it. As to that, please know that you are in the presence of a woman who has read every last word of Guns, Germs, & Steel. There are few amongst us who can say the same.

mixed review

grades 6, 7, & 8

trinomial lollapalooza

In case you're desperately seeking trinomial factoring worksheets:^*

factoring trinomials
answer key

more trinomials
answer key

Algebra 1 at Math TV: worksheets & answer keys



^* Make that desperately seeking worksheets and trying to finish a cat chapter.

Math Drills

Check out this great free worksheet resource for math drills:

http://www.math-drills.com

(Sorry, it's my first post...can't figure out how to make my URLs look pretty like I can in the comments!)

worksheet lollapalooza

Jefferson Davis Learning Center

• developmental math

• algebra worksheets

Fantastic resource. Word problems are great; come with ready-made charts & "buckets" for mixture problems.

Looks like it probably has graphing calculator tutorials or some such, too.

"a minute a day"

by Sheila Compton

She's written One-Minute precision drills for phonics and math one can order (in England, perhaps not the U.S.?)

I love this one (pdf file). I need to figure out how many FOILs one should be able to do per minute...to be fluent.

I've opened a new folder on my hard drive: "One Minute Drills."

Here are her instructions for precision teaching.

Of course, come to think of it, Saxon did this, too. His Fast Facts sheets are all timed.

He probably should have created Fast Facts sheets for his high school books, too.


One Minute addition facts (pdf file)
One Minute multiplication facts (pdf file)

One Minute phonics - Merlin (pdf file)
One Minute phonics - cards (reading fluency) (pdf file)

trying again

hmmm...

The worksheet post I put up awhile ago seems to want to stay hidden behind the aforementioned grey box.

So here's the link: arithmetic - calculus

mother lode

worksheets: arithmetic through calculus

yowza!

Now I can spend the rest of the night downloading stuff onto my desktop instead of revising my chapter.

two birds, one stone

"parents can find worksheets online"

Remember "If students need distributed practice parents can find worksheets online"?

At the time the worksheets C. needed would have been complex angle arrays requiring the student to set up and solve equations in one variable, preferably one variable used on both sides of the equation.

I took the math chair's advice. I searched for angle-slash-algebra worksheets online.

question: Is there a search word for angle-slash-algebra worksheets?

I didn't find any.

So I had to make my own.

As of today, the math chair will be correct, at least for readers of ktm-2: parents can find angle-slash-algebra worksheets online.

Please let me know if you find errors. Thanks!

(I could kick myself. I don't remember the source of these problems. Sorry.)

geometry test grade 6 translations

For some reason I can't get this link (pdf file) on the sidebard.

Doug Sundseth's number lines

pdf files here

fraction number lines

• printable fraction number line
• fraction number line negative values

Becky says she used the number line recommended by Hung Hsi Wu before teaching common denominators and equivalent fractions to her kids.

I don't know what Wu's fraction number line looks like, whether it's a classic line or a stacked set of lines like the one at the link above.

EAI Education sells the Decimal and Fraction Number line pictured. It looks a little confusing to me, but it may make more sense when you can actually hold it.

canadianteacher.com

Christopher had been sailing through his Test Prep book until today, when he hit a snag.

Negative exponents.

Some of you will remember that we had quite a merry little time with negative exponents last year.

Christopher appears not to remember the first thing about negative exponents.

Fortunately for him, I have completed Saxon Algebra 1 in the intervening year, so I now do know a thing or two about negative exponents.

Another thing I know about negative exponents: if you're trying to give your 7th grader practice in negative exponents, it's practically impossible to locate free worksheets online.^*

Still, I've managed to come up with a few things:

• Lecture Notes Math 097 : includes lots of problems with negative exponents & answers (pdf file)

• Professor Howard Sorkin notes & problems (pdf file)

• Glencoe Parent and Student Study Guide Pre-Algebra 4-7: Negative Exponents (pdf file)
  

• Glencoe Parent and Student Study Guide Algebra 1 18-2: Dividing Monomials (pdf file)
  

edhelper, too

The edhelper sheets are pretty good.



Canada Teacher

Wonderful resource:

These tools were made to save teachers time and money! Stop paying for all those reproducible forms and worksheets that are out there. Let’s share what we already have made and stop reinventing the wheel. You can help us by submitting your own forms, letters, and reproducible materials and by visiting the sponsors on the bottom right of each page.

The site has a math worksheet generator that will create simple worksheets on negative exponents. One glitch: the answer sheet appears first. When you click on "Generatore answer sheet" the worksheet itself comes up.

Don't let it fool you.


update:

I was wrong.

Christopher does, in fact, remember the first thing about negative exponents.

Just.

I'm despairing, thinking how much distributed practice he needs on every conceivable procedure and skill (forgetting concepts altogether).

Clearly we need to go back to KUMON.

Just as clearly, I'm not going to be able to get him there.

I just spent half an hour copying out individual knowledge-bits from Saxon Algebra 1.

I guess the plan is .... what?

Either I have to commit the list to memory (along with my list of pre-algebra skills) or put together some kind of Excel grid that allows me to see the most recent time he had distributed practice on a particular skill.

Actually, an Excel chart could be good.

To give you an idea, Christopher's Test Prep book lists 49 separate skills for one school year.

Saxon math, of course, breaks these skills down further than the Test Prep book. Saxon books typically have 120-130 lessons per book, with 1 to 3 concepts or procedures covered in each lesson.

So: at least 250 separate skills in each grade level book, each of which a student has lots of distributed practice doing.

I'm trying to duplicate Saxon without the Saxon.

Reactive teaching to the max.

_______________

^* Ripley's believe it or not: I now own approximately $400-worth of pre-algebra, geometry, and algebra workbooks. I have discovered precisely one worksheet on negative exponents in the lot.


state test coming right up (2006)
throwing money at the problem
more stuff only teachers can buy
help desk 1
state test coming right up (2007)
help desk 2
my life and welcome to it
inflammatory
canadianteacher.com
progress report
despair
28 out of 30

all the answers are belong to us
email to the math chair
second request
teacher's manual
it would be unusual

classic word problems

distance problems (pdf file)

finance problems (pdf file)

mixture problems (pdf file)

solving coin problems (pdf file)

work problems (pdf file)

source:
MOL Handouts

Venn diagram lollapalooza

So.

Venn diagrams.

Going to be on the state test.

C. has not been taught Venn diagrams. He's been tested on Venn diagrams, once, but the subject never actually came up in class.

Math Dad got really activated on that one. Goldstar Homework Mom (this is the mom who's blowing me out of the water on homework supervision, reteaching, and tutoring) actually called me up to commiserate: "The reason J. did well is he just happened to ask the tutor about Venn diagrams the week before the test. That's the only reason he could do them."

As I recall, Math Dad had also just happened to teach his son Venn diagrams before the test....and now my friend Kris tells me she is able to guess what's going to be on the test that hasn't been taught in class ------

question

What is my problem?

Why didn't I just so happen to teach my kid Venn diagrams before the test?

There's an answer to that, and it has to do with short attention span theater.


when you're offered a solution, take it

Have I mentioned that Ed and I asked the new principal to move Christopher out of accelerated math and into regular-track math for the remainder of the year?

Then move him back to accelerated math next fall?

Ed came up with this plan. That's "Ed" as in not just another pain in the tuchus parent, Ed.

Don't get me wrong.

Ed is a pain in the tuchus.

Ed is also a person who has spent his entire adult life successfully teaching subject matter content to students ranging from young adult GED students in Newark (Ed taught algebra) to Ph.D. candidates at NYU.

Ed, a person holding a Distinguished Teaching Award.

Ed, a guy who knows a thing or two about education.

When Ed came up with this plan I thought: Fantastic plan! It works! It works for everyone! Win-win! YAYYYYY!!!

We'd be out of Ms. K's hair; Ms. K would be out of our hair; Christopher would learn pre-algebra to mastery in his new class and algebra at home; in the fall he would enter a class taught by a teacher who would be getting:

a) a student who knows his stuff

b) a set of parents so grateful to be done serving as Emergency Math Reteachers that teacher & principal could count on not hearing one word from them all school year

Sounds like an offer you can't refuse, right?

Wrong.

School can move Christopher down. Here in Irvington, that's a lock. No request to move down is ever denied. Quite the opposite, in fact. Requests to move down are encouraged.

So Christopher can move down.

School can't promise to move him back up come fall. Maybe he'll move back up, maybe he won't. School will decide, not us. School won't be consulting with us, either. School is the decider.

That's Irvington.

No promises.

No consultation.

Certainly no guarantees of achievement - no guarantees child will even be allowed to try to raise his achievement.

We've worked long and hard on our goal of having Christopher take algebra in the 8th grade.

Christopher has worked long and hard.

Hell, people here at ktm have worked long and hard. I've taken just about every piece of advice anyone here ever offered me, up to and including instructivist's recent Comment about doing circle graphs using classroom grade distributions.^*

The whole family has been committed to this effort. We've invested hundreds of dollars in supplemental workbook and texbook costs, thousands of dollars more in lost work time for me.

School can't promise to help us reach our goal, a goal 80% of 7th graders at KIPP can be reasonably confident they'll be reaching next year.

$21,000 per pupil spending; highest property taxes in the country; school is not interested in our goals for our child's education.

Actually, it's worse than that. School is openly indifferent to our goals for our child's education. On occasion school has been openly hostile to our goals.

School can't promise to move him back up.

No reason given.

result: Christopher is staying put.

And I'm teaching Venn diagrams.



back on topic

As advised by our math chair, I am cruising "free worksheets online;" plan to post what I find. If any of you has resources, I'd appeciate your letting me know. Thanks!

• Venn diagram problems
• Venn diagram "graphic organizer"
• Laura Candler's Venn Diagram template
  

whoa:

• mother lode (scroll down)

_____________

^* Christopher loved that problem. He insisted on doing a circle graph of what he surmises to be a typical distribution of grades in Ms. K's class. After he did it he said, "Wow. You can really see how many kids aren't learning math very well."

dropping in for a quick update

Just a quick update. We've finally gotten to Cartesian geometry -- after they did linear and quadratic equations (well, "did" in the current "let's mention it then move on to something else" sense), but only barely. The worksheet had a graph with little cartoon bubble labels: slope, x-axis, y-axis, intercept. The slope bubble pointed to the line, which could just as easily be the equation, but perhaps I'm being picky. Below it was a question: If x is 5, what will y be?

It would have been a perfectly reasonable question except that the tics on the axes weren't labeled. Were they 1, 2, 3, ..., or 2, 4, 6, ..., or 5, 10, 15, ... ? That little glitch made it just a tad difficult to answer the question.

That was presented along with set theory, which was your basic Venn diagrams, with unions and intersections.

Then they went back to "probability and statistics" (and yes, those are sneer quotes). I've already said I think it's bizarre to teach either in the 8th grade, but if you're going to teach it, then teach it. There was no new information presented the second time around. "Probability" was nothing more than your standard ball problem ("If there are 8 green balls and 4 red balls in the hat, what is the probability that you will select a red ball?"), which explains embarrassments like this. Worse was the "statistics" component, which was nothing more than median, mean, and mode.

I hate to break it to the math ed folks, but statistics is not "soft," and it is far more than measures of central tendency. Ultimately, even the hard sciences come down to statistics. Carbon-14 dating (and potassium-argon dating) are statistics. DNA testing is statistics. Epidemiology is statistics.

The math ed people I know wouldn't know a frequentist from a Bayesian, or MANOVA from a t-test. Call me cynical, but I can't help but wonder if that doesn't have something to do with this mess of a curriculum. Why revisit the same concepts over and over again? Couldn't they at least introduce -- in concept, if nothing else -- standard deviations or sample v. population?

If you're going to teach it, teach it. That's my outmoded, stale, dinosaurian view, anyway.

We did the "probability" and "statistics" worksheets in fifteen minutes. That's how much substance there was. But there were terms on the worksheet (she'd copied this one from somewhere, you could tell that) they hadn't covered (from the original source). She had told them to ignore anything they didn't understand (what kind of advice is that for a teacher to give a student?) but he wanted to know what they meant. So we talked about the normal distribution, standard error, and standard deviation (the terms from the original source on the handout).

(By the way, there's an interesting video of Peter Donnelly discussing common statistical errors here, if you're interested.)

In more general terms, I'm teaching Ricky formalism, to set up his problems in sequential, logical steps. He finds it anal retentive, and I'm not drilling him a lot because it frustrates him, but some every time I see him. He just doesn't understand why he should write "Let x equal the number of pears" at the top of the problem. I didn't either when I was his age, but I did it because I had no choice (that's the way math was taught back then). Now, I understand why, and that's why I'm passing it on to him. His biggest problem is that he's pretty good at figuring out how to solve a problem, and he doesn't see why he can't skip steps if he knows the intervening ones. I was like that. But there's a reason for it -- so he won't be like these students.

Anway, back to the beef and noodles.