A Magical Homeschool

Here’s a wonderful free resource to help high school students (or advanced younger kids) practice their math skills.

prACTice 4 success is a PDF workbook intended to offer high school students who have completed algebra and geometry practice on problems similar to those encountered on the math portion of the ACT.

Authors Jeremy Aikin and Matt Bennett say:

Each worksheet has 3 problems and the students should be given exactly 3 minutes time to work them out. These worksheets can be used as a daily warm-up routine for the first five or so minutes of class time. It is important for the teacher to spend a few minutes going over the answers and possible strategies for solving the problems after the students complete each worksheet.

The workbook features problems that test teens in a wide variety of math skills.

Some examples of typical questions include:

A jar contains 16 gum balls: 5 are yellow, 8 are red, and 3 are blue. Two gum balls are selected at random from the jar one at a time. If the first gum ball is red, what is the probability that the second gum ball will also be red?

If a circle has diameter 4, what is its area?

In the standard (x,y) coordinate plane, what is the area of the triangle formed by the lines y=0, x=0 and the line connecting the points (0,3) and (5,0)?

Which of the following equations describes a line that passes through the origin and is parallel to the line 3x -2y = 10?

Questions are all provided with multiple choice options for answers. The answers are provided at the end of the booklet, but no additional information is given about how to solve the problems.

Some questions are fairly simple and straightforward, while some are quite complicated. Some of the questions are also just plain fun brain teasers.

This is a great way to see which math areas your teen understands and which skills need some more instruction.

The workbook was funded by the National Science Foundation GK-12 Fellows Program at Louisiana State University, the Louisiana Education Quality Support Fund, and the Gordon A. Cain Center at Louisiana State University.