As a parent, I’ve often searched for just the right little test or quiz to help my kids practice what they are working on in school. When I can’t find what I want, I make my own. I try to make things that can grow as my needs grow, and have flexibility. As I come up with things, I’ve decided to share them freely on my business site, even though my business has virtually nothing to do with kids, other than these tools make use of data.
Math Facts
My son was struggling originally with addition and subtraction of numbers with a sum of over ten. He could do the ones with single digit sums, like 5+4, but 5+9 was giving him fits. I decided to make up a test, but I wanted to have the ability to tweak them and be random, so that I could change them around whenever the need arose. So, I took a spreadsheet and wrote formulas based on the types of problems I wanted, made the criteria able to be varied, and made each problem have random components. Over time, I evolved the sheet to more types of math as my kids grew. Take a look at the page on this for more details and to download my Excel file or an example.
Word Search
As a Scout Den Leader, one task that is always a challenge is to come up with a “gathering activity.” Word searches and crossword puzzles are good, because they can kill a lot of time and can also be topical to introduce what the meeting will be about. While finding these already made is definitely possible, get exactly what you are looking for is much more of a challenge. So, I created a word search spreadsheet that allows me to put in whatever words I want, in any orientation, then automatically fill in the other spaces in the search with random letters. To make it easier, I made the cells change color and format during the creation stage, so that I can easily see which cells I have used. I can print it that way for reference and then print it with all the cells normal and ready to be searched.
Take a look at the page I wrote on the topic and the examples I’ve made.
More to Come
I’m sure I’ll find other fun things to make in the future as my kids grow and will share them here. I’d appreciate your feedback, and also will be happy to allow you to post links to other sites with helpful tools in a comment below. However, only legitimate links to kid-friendly tools for learning. Unfortunately, in today’s web world, I have to put a couple of layers of screening when folks enter comments to keep out spam.
Also, feel free to use the sharing buttons for your social media platform of choice for this page or any other pages of the site. Enjoy!
