Turn Worksheets into Workstations

I understand the allure of worksheets—really, I do. Students need practice with new concepts, and worksheets provide an easy way to do that. They’re low maintenance. You can run them off, organize them for each day or class period, hand them out, and put students to work. They’re helpful when there’s a substitute in the room, and they’re easy to send home so families can see what their children are doing. For all of those reasons, it’s easy to see why worksheets are so popular.

But if we look a little deeper, we start to notice some drawbacks as well. In this post, I’ll debunk a few common myths about worksheets and show how easy it is to turn them into meaningful workstations.

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You may think it’s easier to run off a stack of worksheets than it is to prepare materials for workstations. In the short term, that might be true. But in the long run, math workstations actually save time.

Throughout this post, I’ll use telling time to the hour and half hour as an example, using the cards pictured below. You’ll find a link to download them at the bottom of this post. Students need practice reading time on both analog and digital clocks, as well as thinking about elapsed time. To give students enough practice with those skills, how many worksheets would you need? Five to ten for each skill? That’s a lot of copying.

Once these cards are made and laminated, they can be used in a variety of ways for years to come. That means next year, when it’s time to plan your time unit, the prep work is already done.

Think about what a worksheet for reading time typically looks like. You might show students analog clocks and have them write the time or draw it on a clock. But with a worksheet, the experience is limited—it’s one and done. Once students complete it, there’s not much opportunity to use it again.

Now think about how the same skill can be practiced with cards. Instead of a one-time worksheet, students use a reusable recording sheet. They choose a card, read the time, and show it on both an analog and digital clock. Because the recording sheet is blank, students can use it again and again, getting far more meaningful practice.

There are a number of other ways students can use the cards in a workstation.

• Use the cards and have students play a memory game. They lay the cards face down in an array. Taking turns, they turn over two cards. If the times on the clocks match, they keep the cards. If they don’t match, they turn them face down in their original positions.
• Use the cards to assign partners. Give a card to each student. They move around and find another student with a matching time and that is their partner.
• Put the times in order with the analog times on top of the digital times.
• Select two cards and use an open number line to find the elapsed time between the two times.
• Choose one clock card and an elapsed time card and find the starting or ending time. Geared student clocks are great to support students with this activity.

Because each time the students do an activity they will be using different cards, students are provided many opportunities for practice without making copies of lots of worksheets.

Next, let’s talk about accountability and communication with parents. Worksheets do make it easy to document student work, and they’re simple to send home. However, there are other ways to hold students accountable and communicate with families that can be even more effective.

Tools like Seesaw, a free digital portfolio, allow students to capture their thinking through photos, videos, audio recordings, or a combination of those. When a teacher approves a student’s entry, families can be notified right away. It’s a powerful way to connect what’s happening in the classroom with what families see at home.

For example, if students are playing a memory game with analog and digital clock cards, they could record a short video at the end showing a matching pair and explaining how they know the times are the same. That kind of thinking and explanation is something a worksheet just can’t capture.

So here’s my call to action. Choose one worksheet you plan to use this week and think about how you could accomplish that same learning objective with a workstation activity rather than the worksheet. If you can, post a picture of the worksheet and how you plan to transform it in the comments. I’m excited to see all the ways we can transform worksheets into more active learning for students!

Here’s the link to download your free resource! It’s part of a larger unit on time that you can view here.