Worksheets and Math Practice

Daily Math Review
Three years’ worth of math review (7 assorted problems per day) for grades 6, 7, and 8 — with answers provided for the busy teacher.

Donna Young’s Math Pages
Worksheets, charts, drill pages, fraction manipulatives, triangular flashcards, and more — plus a great introduction to unit multipliers (also known as conversion factors).

Free Math Worksheets from HomeSchoolMath.net
A variety of worksheets from the author of the Math Mammoth books (and Homeschool Math Blog), with links at the bottom of the page for more freebies.

GetSmarter.org
Try your hand at math and science test questions, and then see how your answers compare to those from students around the world.

MathCounts Drills by Elias Saab
Tough online practice problems for MathCounts preparation, or simply to see if you can handle the challenge. Problems are also available one by one.

MathCounts Toolbox
This is a 9-page summary of the basic facts of elementary math. Go through each page, checking off all the things you know. Then try to learn at least one new math fact per week between now and test time.

Math Drills Homepage
Online mathematics tests and drills for many topics, elementary through university level.

Math Worksheet Generators
“Just the facts, ma’am.” Plenty of formatting choices.

Math Worksheet Site
My personal favorite online generator for basic math worksheets. They also offer a subscription service, if you need a wider choice of topics.

Multiflyer
Online or downloadable game for practicing the multiplication facts. This is the best math fact game I have seen, at a can’t-beat-it price.

Preparation Drills for the SAT-Math Sections
Quiz yourself online to prepare for high-stakes high school testing.

Triangular Numbers are Everywhere!
This worksheet from the IMSA Math Journal examines several examples of triangular numbers in mathematical problems. Can you figure out the patterns?

HomeschoolMath.net
Place value, adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing, fractions, and more.

Interactivate
Lots of projects to try, mostly at the elementary to middle-school level.

Introduction to Probability
A short tutorial with interactive questions from Mrs. Glosser’s Math Goodies. See also: Rolling a Pair of Dice, Conditional Probability, and the Challenge Exercises. And check out Combining Probabilities at MathCounts Central: When more than one thing is happening in a probability problem, how do you know whether to add the probabilities or multiply them? And what happens if the events are not mutually exclusive?

Math.com
Basic math, everyday math, and “hot subjects” like fractions and decimals.

Mathematics at Free-Ed.Net
Arithmetic and pre-algebra.

Problem Solving Strategies
Teach your students to solve problems—by solving problems!

Professor Pig’s Magic Math
Cartoons, hands-on games, and mental math practice — these pdf lessons are excellent to help students understand number bonds, rather than just memorizing math facts. (Only the first two lessons are available now; more coming soon.) See also: Math Games to Download.

Smartkiddies Math
A complete elementary math program developed by Australian teachers. [Edited to add: This used to be free. I just noticed that they now offer a 30-lesson free trial, but regular access is $50/year per family. It's a very reasonable price, but not as good a deal as it used to be!]

Suzanne’s Math Lessons
For upper-elementary and middle school.

The Singapore Maths Teacher
These slide shows demonstrate Singapore-style math models (also known as bar diagrams) step by step, beginning with relatively easy grade 3 word problems and working through to grade 6 stumpers. Excellent for elementary teachers who need to learn how to teach this method. See also: Problem Solving Strategies.

Why We Don’t Divide By Zero
Professor Homunculus of The Math Mojo Chronicles explains the mathematics of dividing by zero.

How to Teach Math to a Struggling Student

Please don’t tell your daughter she has to be either a math person or a language person. It is quite possible to be both. It sounds to me as though she has a very mathematical mind, if she is so good at strategy games and chess. Numbers are only a tiny part of math, even if they are the part that fills elementary textbooks. And if she can analyze a word problem, she is way ahead of many kids her age!

Since her problem shows up in adding and subtracting, it could be a couple of things. Perhaps she does not understand the concepts of putting things together or taking them away — but surely that is NOT true, because she does well with word problems and was doing well with the workbooks you used before. Maybe she loses track of the numbers, especially when she tries to count in her head. If she isn’t sure of her math facts, she probably gets flustered when she has to deal with larger numbers.

Here’s my best guess: I think your daughter’s problem is that she has not quite internalized the place value system. She knows it on a surface level, but she needs to know it down in her bones. This is a key to understanding more math than you would think at first glance.

First Steps to Recovery

• Drop the Saxon textbook, if you have not already done so. That book carries too much emotional baggage at this point.
• Go to the library and check out Family Math if they have it, or The I Hate Mathematics! Book or Math For Smarty Pants, for a more interesting approach to mathematical thinking. Order them through library loan if you have to. Play around with math for awhile before you attempt to do textbooky work again.
• Meanwhile, pick up a cheap workbook for practicing with numbers, or try a few online worksheets from my math resource page.
• Whenever you are ready to try another textbook — next school year, perhaps? — look for one that will focus on conceptual understanding and word problems. I like the Primary Math series, but as you found out before, what works for someone else will not necessarily work for your daughter. If you get a chance to attend a curriculum fair, you may want to take her with you to look around at all the possibilities. Once you decide which math program to try, be sure to use their placement test, so you start working at just the right level.

Learn Math by Playing Games

• Because the number 10 is the foundation of our place value system, your daughter needs to work on the sums that make 10 until she knows them instantly. If you say “6″ she needs to be able to say “4″ right back at you. At her age, this won’t take long, but it is super-important.
• Practice with a math card game like Tens Concentration.
• Practice the math facts until she is confident, and then practice them some more. Try the game that is worth 1,000 worksheets.
• Play some of the advanced games at the end of my number bonds article.

Practice Mental Math Skills

• Talk about how the pairs that make 10 can help her with mental addition and subtraction. If she needs to add 5+8, she knows that:
  
  and
  
  So
  
• Or here is another way to look at the same problem. (There are many ways to approach any math problem!) To figure out 5+8, your daughter could ask herself, “How many more does 8 need to make 10?”
  
• If she needs to figure out 13-7, she can do it backwards:
  
  So
  
  Be sure to notice that you are taking away the 3 and the 4, not taking away the 3 and then adding the 4!
• It may help to use M&Ms or toothpicks to model the numbers, so she can move them around and find the 10. Practice this until she starts thinking in 10s and can immediately recognize them:
  
  or
  
  or
  
  And so forth.
• “Finding the 10″ may sound too simple for a student your daughter’s age, but this is the most important step, because our number system is set up in tens. In our base 10 place value system:
  
  and
  
  Etc.

Moving On to Bigger Numbers

• Now use these same tricks to add or subtract some larger numbers, like her Yahtzee scores. Work in place value columns, but do it differently from what the textbook had her doing. No “carrying” allowed!
• If she is going to add, say, 273+596, have her work from the bigger parts of the numbers to the smaller:
  
  That should give her 7 hundreds, 16 tens, and 9 ones. She can even write it that way, with the 16 in the tens place, as an interim step — have her write the numbers with a wide space between place value columns to allow for this. And then she can easily see that those 16 tens are the same as one more hundred plus 6 tens.
• For subtraction, try the same sort of trick. The next time she needs to subtract something like 462-175, work from the big part to the small part. Start with the hundreds:
  
  Does she understand that 3 hundreds and 6 tens is the same as 36 tens? Now she is ready to take away the 7 tens.
  
  Finally, take away the 5 ones.
  
• She can work in her head if she wants, but she will probably want to write down the numbers as she goes through the steps, at least until she gets used to working this way. The main thing is to give her a different approach from what the textbook did — no “borrowing”! — and set her free from those negative feelings about math.