I’m very sorry for the technical troubles many people have been experiencing with The Math Worksheet Site over the past few days. Scott’s e-mail was down for a day. Our host is having troubles with the server we’re on. Even though the site itself is back up at the moment (Wednesday noon, Mountain Time), we can’t accept subscriptions because our host hasn’t re-installed a Perl module that checks to see if new subscribers’ e-mail addresses look like e-mail addresses. Right now we don’t even have FTP access to our account, so we can’t make a workaround to cope without that missing Perl module. (Can you say FRUSTRATION!!??)

Without FTP access, we also can’t change the home page to publish this message more obviously.

After a month of intermittent troubles, we’re moving to a bigger, more reliable hosting company. The move will begin today, Wednesday (thankfully!).

Our address at TheMathWorksheetSite.com will remain the same. It may take up to 48 hours for Domain Name System servers around the world to receive the news that the address of TheMathWorksheetSite.com is at our new host. It may look to you like we’re down for a little more time (ugh).

We don’t yet know everything involved in our move, as we’re moving to a very different kind of hosting plan and we’ll be learning as we’re going.

For those who care about the details, we’re moving to a managed Virtual Private Server, or VPS. This is one step down from a dedicated server, but a huge step up from the shared hosting plan we’d been on.

Thanks for your patience. As soon as our move is complete, our plan is that our technical troubles should be over, and we should have the 100% up-time that is our goal.

–Denise

Hi everyone,

Scott has added a handful of new worksheets this week to the subscribers area. But if your browser draws from its cache, you won’t see the updated subscribers area home page. Therefore you won’t even know about the new worksheet titles. The same is true of selection pages you visit frequently. We recently added memo lines to all but 4 titles, and are slowly adding Spanish and French language options to more worksheets.

I suggest that every now and then frequent users of The Math Worksheet Site should click “refresh” or “reload.” Perhaps we added something since the last time your browser got a fresh copy from the server. If we added it, I want you to be able to see it!

–Denise

I’m delighted to report that the memo line project is nearly finished. Almost every selection page in the subscribers area now include a box for you to type text that will be printed on the lower left corner of the worksheet. As usual, the project took longer to complete than I thought it would. (I guess I’m an optimist?)

The four Canadian money worksheets are the only ones that don’t currently have a memo line option. We haven’t figured out yet what to do with the disclaimer on those worksheets. The disclaimer is required by the Bank of Canada when using their graphics. It is in that same lower left-hand corner where the memo line ’should’ go. We’ll be giving that some thought. I welcome your suggestions, too.

A friend is really pleased about the usefulness of the memo line. She prints math worksheets for 8 of her children for the entire week all at one sitting. She says it will be great help to her to be able to put a child’s name on each worksheet as she’s printing the week’s math practice.

If you’re not seeing the memo line option on each selection page, please click Refresh/Reload to get a fresh copy from the server.

I’m glad to add yet another aspect of usefulness to The Math Worksheet Site to serve our subscribers better.

–Denise

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

I’m really thrilled when I think of the broad reach and usefulness of The Math Worksheet Site. We have subscribers all over the world. Just in the last few days people have subscribed from England and Canada, as well as from a variety of states in the USA. There are links to The Math Worksheet Site on web pages whose languages I cannot read! We added money worksheets for British pounds, Canadian dollars and Euros because we have subscribers in places that use those monetary systems.

Subscribers to The Math Worksheet Site live in 19 different countries, as well as in every state in the United States of America.

There is great diversity among our subscribers, also.

Our worksheets are used by…

• Public school teachers for extra practice for a few individual students.
• Homeschoolers to supplement a curriculum.
• A church program to train homeless people in job skills.
• Parents to supplement the practice the student is getting at school.
• Human resource departments’ staff to pre-test job applicants.
• Homeschoolers for the entirety of the student’s math practice.
• Public school teachers for customized lessons for the entire class.
• Teachers at juvenile detention facilities for residents who need math instruction.
• College teachers for remediation.
• Parents to help their children retain math skills during the summer break from school.
• School principals to occupy students who are sent to them for disciplinary action.
• Teachers with Job Corps for teaching employment skills and assisting students to earn a GED.

If you know of any other interesting uses for or users of The Math Worksheet Site worksheets, I’d love to hear them!

–Denise

This is The Math Worksheet Site, and our emphasis is on math. However, there are some other subject areas that can be enhanced by worksheets available to our subscribers:

• Graph paper can be a great asset for teaching perspective in art.
• Foreign currency worksheets can give flavor to a social studies lesson.
• Practicing writing numbers is handwriting.
• Binary, octal and hexadecimal conversion worksheets may suit a computer science class.
• The two Liquid Measure titles are helpful in home economics.
• Reading an Architect’s Scale was designed for a high school drafting teacher.
• Checks and Check Register is useful for learning life skills.
• Of course Tangrams and Graphing: Code Grid both have educational properties, but I call them fun!

I hope you make good use of our worksheets that also fit in other subject areas.

–Denise

Today we added a tortoise to the 19 cute pieces of art used currently on 5 different worksheet titles in the subscribers area. This tortoise has a story behind him.

The previous 19 pieces of artwork were drawn by our friend Carole Manning. She has also taught art to our children at different times over the past 5 years. This summer our families are getting together once a week. I teach piano, then Carole teaches art to the various assembled children (at least those ages 4 and up!). It has been a lot of fun to learn together.

Our daughter Anna, age 11, has quite a bit of talent in art, and Carole has been happy to encourage that talent over the years. (And since I have absolutely no art training, and probably little talent, I, too, am thrilled with Carole’s training and encouragement of my daughter’s efforts in art!)

Earlier this summer, Anna said, “I think we should add a turtle to The Math Worksheet Site. I can just see how Mrs. Manning would draw it.” I replied, “Well, if you can see how Mrs. Manning would draw it, why don’t you draw it?”

That thought percolated for a few weeks. Anna began to draw a tortoise from her own thinking. We looked up pictures of turtles thanks to Google Image Search. We then learned about some differences between turtles and tortoises, and I learned how to spell ‘tortoise.’ She drew and re-drew, practiced and practiced again. She sought parental input and tried again.

A couple of days later, she had finished her tortoise, showed her parents and Mrs. Manning, and the paper lay on her daddy’s desk, patiently waiting for him to put it on the site. (I, on the other hand, was not as patient as that paper!)

Today Scott found it difficult to wrap his brain around some complicated back-end things he’s working on for the site, so he picked something easy to do: trace and add the tortoise to the site.

Scott even changed the credit line to include Anna, though she thought that should wait until she has a few more pieces of art on the site. (So I note that she’s thinking about drawing more?!! )

If you are a subscriber and would like to see the tortoise right now, you can follow instructions on the previous blog entry entitled “Insider’s Trick.”

I’m so pleased about the various ramifications of this: Anna and I worked on it together and that was great, her artwork is able to enhance the family business, her art was put alongside her teacher’s work, and her skill was definitely validated and encouraged by her daddy adding it to the web site he sees as “his baby.”

I’m so thrilled! My daughter, the published artist!!

–Denise

This morning we received a request for a modification of the Addition: Money worksheet. Sandy has been using that worksheet specifically for calculator practice for her students, but wanted problems with 10 addends. She gives calculator practice from a paper, then uses those skills to practice shopping, directing her students in real life money-and-calculator calculations.

We can’t make the problems each have 10 addends and keep the font size similar to the student’s handwriting size, because we’d have only a few problems on the page. However, for calculator practice, the problems certainly don’t need to be similar to the size of the student’s handwriting. So Scott made a “back door” of sorts to fulfill the request.

If you want up to 10 addends for Addition: Money, and the font size is unimportant to you, here is what to do:

• Log in to the site and go to Addition: Money.
• Make the selections you want and click “Create It.”
• Read the URL at the top of the screen. Note where it says “numberofaddends=” and it shows the number of addends you selected.
• Carefully put your cursor in the URL, delete just the number of addends, and carefully type the number of addends you want. Leave the equals sign there, as well as the rest of the long URL.
• Click “Go” or press the “Enter” key.

The site will give you another Addition: Money worksheet. It will have problems with the number of addends you specified.

We’re pleased to add one more aspect of usefulness to The Math Worksheet Site.

–Denise