Over the past month, I’ve been replacing and adding horizontally arranged arithmetic worksheets to Math-Drills. The older ones are being replaced because the new ones are fillable and savable. This gives you an option of completing the worksheets on the screen or on paper. At the same time, I’ve reorganized some sections, so a few things might have moved around. These new worksheets can be found on various pages including addition, subtraction, multiplication and division and soon on the mixed operations page. Just look for worksheets with the word horizontal in the title.
Horizontally arranged questions are useful for mental math and to test students’ understanding of place value.
Many of the new and replaced math worksheets focus on arithmetic facts, but some also include multi-digit numbers. In a vertical arrangement, multi-digit numbers almost always have the places already lined up, so students can use an algorithm and perhaps not pay much attention to the actual numbers. With horizontally arranged multi-digit questions, students need to have a keen sense of place value and will use it to calculate the answer. Here is an example of a four-digit plus three-digit addition worksheet being filled out on the screen:
Another advantage of horizontally arranged questions is they are better read by screen readers. For students that use assistive reader software, these worksheets might be more suitable than ones with a vertical arrangement.
Much care was taken to ensure a good distribution of questions on each worksheet. For worksheets where there are more questions on the page than are available (e.g. Multiplying (0 to 12) by 4 only has 13 possible questions), the possible questions are randomly mixed at the start then repeated as many times as needed on the page. For worksheets where there are more possible questions than questions on the page, every question on the page will be different.
For some of the worksheets, large print options with 25 questions on the page exist. Other options include 50 and 100 questions per page.
