Recently a subscriber named Anna asked if she could put her own custom text onto the worksheets she prints for the students she tutors. She gives her students packets of homework and wants to indicate on the worksheets the order in which each student is to complete them.

Introducing… the memo line!

When you type your memo line in the box provided for it on the selection page, your text will be placed on the bottom left corner of both the worksheet and the answer key. The memo line is small so it won’t distract the student from the content of the worksheet.

Teachers can use this to connect individual worksheets with codes in their grade books.

My 11 year-old daughter plans to use it to type little messages to the sister she helps with math. (Although I pointed out that the font size is quite small for her sister to read!)

As of now, Friday morning, I’ve updated over 20% of the worksheet titles to include the memo line. I’m working mostly from the top to the bottom of the subscribers area home page, and have just finished all the worksheets in the Addition category. If you don’t see a memo line section on a selection page, click “refresh” or “reload.” Perhaps your browser was drawing from its cache instead getting a fresh copy from the server.

If you have other ideas for how to use the memo line, I’d love to hear them.

–Denise

In the wee hours of the morning, Scott completed some major upgrades to the back end of The Math Worksheet Site. But apparently he made some mistakes, as we weren’t getting any new subscriptions via credit card. One person e-mailed us with enough information that Scott found and fixed a problem. However, the rate of credit card subscriptions was something like 10% that of yesterday, so we were still worried that something was still broken.

It turned out our concerns had validity and Scott’s HTML didn’t. There was a mistake in the HTML code in a few files, and just now when he ran it through the W3C Markup Validation Service, it didn’t validate. But now he’s fixing the problem and now there should be an “OK” button to actually let people proceed with the subscription process instead of it’s absence halting them part-way through the process.

So to folks who tried to sign up this morning and couldn’t, we appreciate your interest and please try again. It’s being fixed now and this upgrade is finished (whew!).

–Denise

One of the more frequent questions we’re asked sounds something like this. “Why don’t you organize your site by grade levels?” Or, “Which worksheets should I use for fourth grade?”

There are several reasons why The Math Worksheet Site is not organized by grade levels.

Many of our selection pages offer a broad enough range of options that a particular type of worksheet could span two or three grade levels. So we can’t say a particular worksheet title is a certain grade level, because it would depend on the selections chosen.

Different schools, different curricula, different U.S. state standards and different countries place certain math skills in different grade levels. So some concepts taught in “first grade” in one curriculum may be taught in “kindergarten” in another curriculum. Some countries don’t even have “kindergarten,” they begin school with “Grade 1.”

Many math concepts are taught more than once. They’re re-taught for reinforcement at several grade levels. Therefore a particular type of worksheet is useful at several grade levels.

One of the reasons The Math Worksheet Site isn’t organized by grade levels is that the creators of the site are homeschool parents who don’t think in terms of grade levels.

We want children to master, say, the multiplication tables. But whether the students are attending “second grade,” “third grade,” “fourth grade” or “Resource” when they learn those multiplication tables, we’re just glad they’ve learned them. Our goal is to provide a tool to help the teachers to teach and the students to learn those multiplication tables.

We feel that it’s an asset to have the site organized by topic. No matter where your student is with respect to the local grade level, you don’t have to guess where to find what you need. You don’t have to think, “He’s actually in 3rd grade, but he’s advanced. Should I look in the 4th grade category, or is this topic in the end-of-3rd grade materials?” You know the topic he’s working with, so you can find the practice he needs.

We organize The Math Worksheet Site by topic and trust that the teachers and parents can find what they need by topic.

–Denise