All of a sudden, children are out of school and classes have moved to an online format. This is likely unfamiliar territory for kids and their parents. Instead of practice worksheets that would be handed out in class, parents have to figure out how to support their child’s learning at home.
When our kids were in elementary school over 15 years ago, they practiced math using Math Minutes. These exercises gave them one minute to solve as many math problems on the sheet as they could. This helped them build their mental math skills.
To help our kids practice at home, I used Excel to generate practice sheets they could complete at the kitchen table each night. Using Excel allowed me to easily generate new sheets each day. Our now mid-twenties son still remembers how much these sheets helped him back then.
To help all the parents who are now having to work on math skills at home with their children during the school shutdown, I re-engineered my workbook from the past. I created a downloadable workbook that can quickly generate eleven different types of math worksheets to practice all four math operations at basic and advanced levels and the problems can be adjusted to match the skill level of every child.
Back in the day we printed out the worksheets but in the video below I offer a total of five methods you can use to make these worksheets available to your kids, including ones that allow them to use the Office programs on a phone or tablet to complete the problems.
You can check out the video below where I explain how the worksheets are built, how to quickly generate an infinite number of worksheets, and the five methods of distributing them to your kids. You can download the workbook by right-clicking on this link and saving the file to your computer. Update April 6, 2020: I’ve created a second workbook you can download and customize. This one adds worksheets for adding and subtracting fractions as well as beginner levels of algebra. You can download this workbook by right-clicking on this link and saving the file to your computer. It uses a few more advanced formulas in Excel to create the worksheets but uses the same Inputs sheet to set the difficulty level.
Note: These Excel files can be used in any program that supports XLSX files, including Google Sheets. Google Sheets does not have a recalculation button like Excel does, so to generate a new version of the worksheet, enter any letter in a blank cell and press Enter. You can then delete the character and another version will be created.
If you create a PDF worksheet, this bonus video will show you how a student can complete the worksheet on an iPad using the free Microsoft OneNote app and write the answers with their finger or a stylus. To change the pen color or thickness in OneNote on an iPad, follow the instructions in this article: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/change-the-pen-color-or-thickness-in-microsoft-onenote-44f7d2df-b3ff-44a1-8a85-6f686afa2ed6.
If you create a PDF worksheet, this bonus video will show you how a student can complete a the worksheet on an iPhone using PDF annotation in the free Microsoft OneDrive app (also works the same way on OneDrive on an iPad).
I hope that this workbook and these videos will help you and your kids during the time that they are not in school.
If your job includes reporting financial data, check out the videos on my YouTube channel, including this collection of 25 Advanced Excel Chart Tips and Tricks. Subscribe to the channel to learn about new videos as I post them.
Dave Paradi has over twenty-two years of experience delivering customized training workshops to help business professionals improve their presentations. He has written ten books and over 600 articles on the topic of effective presentations and his ideas have appeared in publications around the world. His focus is on helping corporate professionals visually communicate the messages in their data so they don’t overwhelm and confuse executives. Dave is one of fewer than ten people in North America recognized by Microsoft with the Most Valuable Professional Award for his contributions to the Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams communities. His articles and videos on virtual presenting have been viewed over 4.8 million times and liked over 17,000 times on YouTube.