Math worksheets are a great way to get an idea of what your middle and high school students understand. However, day after day of worksheets can get very boring, very quickly. I always know that it’s time to switch up my routine when I start getting bored in class. If I’m bored from what we’re doing, then I can’t imagine how bored my students are from just taking notes and completing worksheets.
There are lots of digital and printable activities out there that you can purchase on TPT or that you can create yourself. If you’re not looking to spend money or a lot of extra time outside of your prep period, I am sharing a few low prep ways that you can turn math worksheets into more engaging activities for your students.
The first low-prep activity that you can do is a gallery walk. To set up a gallery walk, you’ll take one printed copy of your worksheet and cut out some individual problems. You can choose to use either vertical whiteboards or anchor chart paper.
You will tape one problem to each new writing surface. Ideally, each group will have three to four students. If you have a class of 20 students, I would have six stations for your students to cycle through during the gallery walk.
How does the activity work?
For the purpose of this explanation, I am going to say that you are using anchor chart paper. Each group will start at a specific station. Then, they will work together to solve the problem on their anchor chart paper.
The idea is that the students are not working on their own pencil and paper assignment but rather working together by all writing on the same piece of anchor chart paper.
Once your students have completed the question, they will rotate to the next station. The rotation can look however you want it to in your classroom.
During the next round, they will either correct the errors of the previous group or they will solve the problem using a different method. This would work really well for systems of equations where the students could solve the problem using substitution, elimination, or graphing.
After a few rotations you can have the students go back to their original station and open up a discussion about the methods that they chose or the common errors that they saw.
This activity is a great option for test review because you’re able to incorporate multiple types of questions and distribute them among the different stations.
For example, if you’re teaching factoring, you could have one question that is factoring trinomials when a = 1, another question that is solving a quadratic equation by factoring, and another question where students need to factor the difference of two squares.
Using Whiteboards
I have done this activity a lot of times when I’m in a pinch and I want my students to be more engaged. It also really helps me be able to check in with my students to see how they’re doing and identify which students I need to give some extra support.
To set up this activity, each student will need an individual whiteboard and dry erase marker. You will be at the front of the room with the math worksheets. It is a good idea to pick the questions you want to ask the students ahead of time, so that you can make yourself a key. This also shortens transition times between questions.
One at a time, you will write each question on the board. The students will solve the first problem on their individual whiteboards. When they have their answer, they can either raise them up so you can see their answers or you can circle around the room and check their work at their desks.
This usually keeps my students engaged for 8 to 10 problems and I’m able to make note of who needs extra practice and what their overall understanding is for the specific topic.
Task Cards
Using math worksheets as task cards has a similar set up to the gallery walk activity. For set up, you’ll take a worksheet, cut out however many questions you want your students to answer and tape them around your classroom.
Once you have the questions taped to the wall, your students can get up and go to whichever problem they want to solve first.
If you don’t have the time to make an answer sheet (which I’m assuming you don’t because you’re looking for a low-prep activity), have your students take a piece of lined paper and fold it in half three times.
This will make 16 boxes between the two sides of paper where you students can label the numbers and show their work.
When you are creating task cards on the fly, I would recommend putting them in a sheet protector before hanging them on your wall. This ensures that your students won’t be able to destroy them as easily and you can reuse them for other classes.
Card Sort
This activity has the most end up prep time, but I wanted to offer it to you anyway because I think it could be a really good idea for a lesson plan in your classroom. You can take any worksheet (I like to use Kuta Software worksheets because they already have an answer key) and make a few copies of the answer key.
For this activity, you will need more than one worksheet, so that you can have students working in multiple groups together. This could also be one station of your regular math centers, so that you have less students working on it at one time.
You’re going to take a worksheet and cut out each of the problems and answers. I like to put them in plastic bags so that the groups don’t fall apart. If you really have time, you can laminate the little pieces, but that might not be worth it since the questions and answers are so small.
Then, your students will get all of the answers and the cards with the solutions and they will need to solve the problem and match them to the correct answer.
If you want to make this a little trickier and so that your students can’t rely on the process of elimination, I would add a few more answers than questions. For example, if you have a total of 12 questions that you want your students to solve, add in 6 extra answers from problems on the worksheet that aren’t being used.
My final thoughts about turning math worksheets into different activities
Anything that will change up your day to day routine in math class will make all of the difference in your students’ engagement! Like I always say, experiment with different activities and see what works well for your teaching style and students.