Area worksheets

The drawing agrees with the labels. A shape marked 8 by 3 is drawn eight units by three units, at one scale for the whole figure — which sounds like the minimum and is the thing worksheets get wrong most often. A rectangle labeled 8 by 3 and drawn 8 by 4 teaches a child that the picture is decoration and the numbers are the question, which is the opposite of what a geometry sheet is for.

A triangle carries a base and a height and nothing else. The sloping side is left unlabeled on purpose: the commonest mistake in this topic is multiplying the two numbers that happen to be printed, and a sheet that offered a third number would be inviting it.

The answers were worked out when the problems were, so the key is the same page with the answers drawn in rather than a second attempt at the same questions — there is no way for the two to disagree. The number in the footer is the seed the sheet was built from: it is printed so that the identical sheet can be had again next week, rather than one that merely looks like it.

This page is one sheet out of a family that can print thousands, and the settings behind it — how many problems, how big the numbers get, how they are laid out, whether there is room to work — are all switches. The builder link at the top of the page carries this sheet’s own settings, so the bench opens on exactly the sheet here rather than on a blank one.

The configuration travels in the address bar rather than on a server, so the link can be bookmarked or sent to somebody as it stands — and what they open is this sheet, down to the seed, rather than another one like it.

Not in the games. The multiplication under every area is, in The Grid.