Sometimes, you really need a basic practice worksheet – pure and simple, drill and kill, no fuss or problem solving. This might be for a five-minute heads-down skills practice in class, to source questions for a revision lesson, or simply to satisfy the rare pupil who asked where they can go to get extra work.
I use textbooks less and less in my teaching now, and I find that the exercises in most new textbooks aren’t great for what I want out of the lesson. If I want basic skills practice, there’s often bits in there I don’t want the pupils doing (such as a substitution exercise which uses negative numbers before they’ve been taught this), and then there’s the irritating bit of explaining that they need to start on Q3 and do up to Q5, then move on to Q21 on the next page, and it’s all more trouble than it’s worth. And let’s not talk about having to hand the flipping things out…
The other thing that worksheet generators are great for is making up questions quickly to use in a resource. Humans are notoriously bad at being truly random, and I’m well aware I’ve written resources with repeat or very similar questions in before. They also work well for things like solving quadratics using the formula – the numbers you use don’t really matter, but the questions need to have solutions!
So here’s my top 5 sites for basic practice worksheets – you’re not going to get any stunningly engaging resources here, but sometimes teaching is more important than entertainment.
Worksheet Math
The worksheets on Worksheet Math are some of the best basic practice examples I’ve seen – there’s nothing groundbreaking here, but the worksheets can be customised in quite a lot of depth. The trigonometry page contains options to choose worksheets with each trigonometric ratio, only missing sides, only missing angles or any mixture you like. Answer sheets are also generated automatically, which makes this site great for a bit of emergency practice. It’s not complete for all topics yet, but what is there is very good.
Active Worksheets
I discovered Active Worksheets during my NQT year – there’s a small subscription fee of £15, but it’s well worth it for the time you save. As with Worksheet Math, the level of customisation allows you to generate questions which drill right into minute detail of topics – I used the five different options for factorising quadratics to create a set of differentiated questions for a starter activity really quickly. The only drawback is that the software occasionally generates duplicate questions, but I just get pupils to skip the repeat out.
Math Aids
Math Aids is probably the king of basic worksheets – again, plenty of options to choose from when creating the sheets, and answers are automatically supplied. This makes the list because the index of worksheets is one of the biggest I’ve seen, and I don’t think I’ve failed to find something useful whenever I’ve looked here for quick questions.
Worksheet Works
While their collection of basic worksheets is fairly small (and targeted at primary and pre-algebra skills), it’s worth checking out some of the puzzle generators available on Worksheet Works. The crossnumbers and maths squares are both great for term-enders, and the problem search is a nice, different way to do a bit of times-tables practice.
BBC Skillswise
BBC Skillswise is a great resource for functional maths topics; the short video clips are good hooks at the start of a lesson, and I’ve had a lot of success using their resources to deliver a “maths for life” type approach with older pupils. While the worksheets are as-is (they’re not generated, so you get one set of questions), I’ve included them on the list because they are a good source of simple accessible questions with some elements of basic problem solving.
