On Worksheets
Worksheets are an indispensable part of teaching. Not only do they provide the practice
students need to master a concept or skill but they make a positive contribution
to a classroom teacher's sanity. Teachers generally spend the majority of their
day in direct teaching, either working with the class as a whole, groups within
the class, or individual students. But they can't be on stage all the time. They
need time to catch their breath, gather their thoughts, and martial their resources
for the next lesson. That's where worksheets get to play their double role: as essential
practice in mastering a taught skill or concept and as essential respite for the
teacher. Granted there are other sources for the requisite practice but none as
flexible and versatile as the lowly worksheet.
Text books generally include practice exercises. But these exercises are usually
limited in how much practice they offer. If the class, or some of the students in
the class, did adequately master a particular concept and skill, teachers as often
as not find themselves pawing through obsolete texts, assorted workbooks, and file
folders of faded black-line masters for additional practice materials. Even if the
textbook provides sufficient material for the students to initially master the skill,
there may not be any material left for later review.
Textbooks are also not as portable as worksheets. Send the class home with their
textbooks to complete the exercise on page 64 and it's a pretty good bet that not
all of the textbooks will come back the next day. Textbooks are also expensive.
Start the year with a class set and by the end of the year some of them will have
evaporated, which will create havoc with the teacher's budget for classroom materials.
Workbooks suffer from many of the same disadvantages as textbooks. They are costly,
students leave them at home, or simply lose them. The exercises may or may not target
the concept or skill that requires the extra reinforcement. And if an appropriate
exercise can be found, it may not provide sufficient material.
Teachers generally have a collection of black-line masters and assorted worksheets
that they have either created themselves or gleaned from other sources over the
years. Sometimes they have the exact exercise required, and sometimes they don't.
Sometimes the materials have no copyright protection and can be freely photocopied,
and sometimes they don't. It tends to be rather hit and miss.
Then there is the old teacher standby: create the needed practice material on the
chalk board and have the students copy it down and complete it in their notebooks.
Advantages? The cost is negligible, just whatever chalk goes for these days. Disadvantages?
Some of the students won't get it all copied down in the time allotted, some of
the students will copy it down incorrectly, the exercise will likely get erased
by the custodian that night even if you do write PLO (Please Leave On) all over
the board, your work cannot be saved and used again, and if you write any of the
exercise while the class is in the room your back will be to the class - a risky
endeavor at best.
Putting the exercise on a transparency and using an overhead projector is an improvement
over the chalk board. But the problem remains that the class will either not all
be able to copy it down in time or will make mistakes in the copying process.
Most teachers have tried the do-it-yourself method of practice material creation.
It generally only requires some paper, a pencil, a neat hand, a clear workspace,
and a lot of free time after school. For some reason this method seems to work best
for student teachers on a teaching practicum and is occasionally extended to the
more energetic of first-year teachers.
And so we return to worksheets. Worksheets offer several advantages over any other
method of advancing and reinforcing learning. They can be created to target the
exact skill or concept being taught. They can be extended to provide as little or
as much practice as required. They can be customized to meet the learning requirements
of individual students. They can be assigned for homework. They can be sent home
without the worry of loss as they can be easily replaced. They are relatively economical.
They can be saved for future use.
The only potential disadvantage to worksheets is that they have to be created. That's
where worksheet creation software comes in. Software like Mathematics Worksheet Factory can
make the task of worksheet creation a breeze. Need a 20 question addition worksheet
in which each question has four addends with values between 10 and 99? In a matter
of seconds you can create the worksheet and the answer key. Need a worksheet to
give students practice in telling time with traditional clock faces? Again, a few
seconds and a couple of mouse clicks and you can have a worksheet with 10 clock
faces with different times and an answer key.
Or a program like
Vocabulary Worksheet Factory lets you easily create worksheets based on
a set of words from spelling, science, social studies, or any other subject. A few
moments and you can turn out a crossword, a word search, word jumbles, or a decoding
worksheet.
Need a worksheet with a map of North America? Try Map Worksheet Factory.
Not convinced? Take any of the above programs for a free trial run. Download a fully functional evaluation version of any
of our programs and decide for yourself.