Multiplication Worksheet Grade 3: Fill & Download for Free

I learned multiplication in first grade while in detention.The reality: I was a “troublemaker” who always raced through my work, eager to get done and move on. But there never was anything else. So in first grade, I got sent to the computer lab, the corner, told to sit on my hands, labeled ADD/ADHD… you name it. (As an aside, it wasn’t until 3rd grade that a teacher gave me 4th and 5th grade worksheets, called “Brain Busters” and “Extra Credit” that I stopped getting into trouble and doing those instead.)I was in detention for whatever inane reason. The school I went to had detention during recesses and after school, in a small room (as there were only ever 2 or 3 kids at most in detention).In there with me was one other kid, a 6th grader. I was bored stiff, playing “Street Fighter” with my fingers (Left was Ryu, Right was Ken).I saw he had a worksheet. So I asked him what it was.Me: “What’s that?”Him: “Multiplication.” (I knew of it because my brother was 4 years older, but not how it worked.)Me: “How does it work?”Him: Shows me the paper. “You just take one number, this many times. Or that number, this many times.”Me: Wheels turning in my head. I can count by fives easily, so I look at a 6x5 problem. “So that one is (Ryu holds up a finger for each five - five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty five, thirty) 30?”Him: “Wow, you’re right, kid. What about … this one?” He points to a harder one.Me: Excited now. “Oh, that’s 8x3, so 8 … 16 … 24?”There’s not much more that happened after that, except that my world was brightened to the joys of multiplication. I had it down solid by the end of first grade.To this day, I try to explain it, but no one seems to believe that I learned it in detention from a simple “This that many times” explanation.So I simply say, “I love math.”

My sixth-grade math teacher. Mrs. Day.Unlike many of the other answerers, I can’t point to single events of extreme meanness or even violence. She never said anything especially mean; she never insulted us; she never screamed or shouted or even raised her voice. She didn’t have to. She just had a personality like a rotten piece of raw chicken meat pickled in ice-cold ammonia.It didn’t help that it was sixth grade math. I don’t know what the curriculum is like now, but at the time, as near as I can recall, we’d learned simple addition and subtraction in 1st grade (i.e. at the age of six), simple multiplication in 2nd grade, addition and subtraction of 2-digit numbers in third grade, 3-digit numbers in fourth grade (and I think we started long division around that time, but it might have been later), 4-digit numbers in fifth grade. . . I remember thinking that my father, who was a math professor, probably taught his students to add and multiply 20-digit numbers, because I figured you just added one digit with every year of schooling.I’m sure I’m leaving stuff out; there was more content than that, including geometry and such. But by 6th grade, at that time and place, math class was an awful lot of drill-and-kill, a ton of worksheets with nothing but math problems—and as far as I remember, nothing that was conceptually new. In seventh grade we started preparing for algebra and learning some statistics. In sixth grade, it was all the same stuff we’d been doing for a couple of years—just more and more and more of it. It could not have been more effective at killing any interest we had in math if it had been deliberately designed for that purpose.So the curriculum was pretty damn joyless, but maybe a more human teacher could have made it bearable. Mrs. Day, however, was not that teacher. Every day there were worksheets in class and worksheets to take home, watched over by this grim, hatchet-faced middle-aged lady with a voice like the creak of a coffin lid, as much sense of fun as a roadkilled armadillo, and as much expressiveness, warmth and gentleness as an inukshuk, who rarely spoke except to lecture or to express disappointment. I don’t know if she deliberately turned the air conditioning down twenty degrees—but it felt like it in that classroom.Every time you forgot to do your homework—worksheets, always worksheets—she filled out something called a Discipline Sheet, which you had to show your parents, get them to sign it, and then return it the next day. I racked up seven of those that year. And some of you were little hellions in class, but I was a pretty conscientious kid. I hated getting a Discipline Sheet, and I hated the way her lips would purse and her eyes would narrow with even more disapproval than usual. I usually didn’t have trouble remembering to do the homework of the less repulsive teachers. But after a few weeks of sixth grade, every day, ten minutes before the bell would ring to send us to second period, I would always get this horrible sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Even if I wasn’t thinking about Mrs. Day’s class, my stomach would remind me like clockwork.I was later told that when she had her conference with my parents, she said, “Well, Ben may be gifted in other things, but he’s certainly not gifted in math!”To which my father said, “Bullshit.”Thank you, Dad.When I got As in two semesters of honors calculus, my freshman year at university, seven years after leaving Mrs. Day’s joyless tutelage, I wanted to go back to Edgar Martin Middle School, waltz into her classroom, and shove my transcript in her face. I didn’t. But I sometimes I still wish I had. She was the only teacher I’ve ever had, at any level, who ever inspired that level of vindictiveness in me.Maybe she had some deep personal sorrow or tragedy that had turned her that way. . . or maybe she was burned out (which I honestly wouldn’t blame her for; thirty years of teaching sixth graders would ablate anyone’s soul). I will never know. And I don’t care. She should not have been teaching.I hope she is enjoying her career in Malebolge. Bitch.

That there were problems that I couldn’t solve, and that the “power ladder” in any subject is unimaginably high.In 3rd grade math, whenever we finished the lesson, the teacher would give us worksheets of number puzzles - “a number plus 5 is 7, what is the number?” (Suddenly, I’m starting to realize why learning algebra several years later was so easy for me)Soon, I finished the first set of puzzles, and proudly handed it in. This is easy!Then, it kept getting harder. The secret number started having coefficients in front of it. “Three times a number plus seven is sixteen. What is the number?” Still easy.Then, negatives. “Five minus my number is three.” That one took some thinking.Then, the number showed up on both sides. “Twice my number is equal to my number plus 5.” Still not that bad…Then, all of the above. “17 minus twice my number is 7 plus 3 times my number.” Uh oh.Then, parentheses. “4 plus twice (my number plus 3) is 22.” How many of these are there?!I vividly remember the parentheses showing up on worksheet number 6. I also remember there being over 20 of these things. For the first time, I had to think in math class. But I’ll make it through, I’m smart and can solve anything!I remember one day, there was a problem that I just. Couldn’t. Solve. I tried all my third grader algebra techniques - using logic (subtracting a constant from both sides), balancing (subtracting x from both sides), and even division stuff (dividing both sides by a constant)! Finally, I shamefully had to resort to more plebeian methods - guess and check. That didn’t work either, and I even checked the negative numbers and some fractions! I was well and truly suck. And the worst part was, I wasn’t even near the end - this was on worksheet 12 out of 20. How hard is that 20th worksheet?!?!I never did get to that 20th worksheet before the year was over, although I did solve that one problem eventually (I probably made some arithmetic error during my guess and check session).Another thing we did was the “mad minute”. Every week, we would get a sheet of 30 (or maybe it was 40 or 50 or 60) math problems to do in a minute. There were lots of levels to this one too.(Bonus question: how many problems are on this sheet?)If you succeeded in one level (by getting more than some threshold), you would go up a level next time. Soon, I emerged at the front of the pack, along with a “rival”. Both of us were passing every single level. We got through all the addition worksheets, and were still tied. Subtraction, still tied. Most of the multiplication worksheets, still tied. Then came the fateful day when we were on the last multiplication worksheet. I made too many mistakes. He passed, I didn’t.How could this happen? I’m the smartest one in the class! How could he do better than me?I started crying (yes, I was that kid in 3rd grade). In my defense, I would have to wait a whole week to try again, and it was almost the end of the year! I’d only have a few opportunities to catch up to him!In the end, I never did catch up to him. He ended the year a solid 2 levels above me (I messed up one of the division ones too).Looking back, I’m realizing that what I learned in 3rd grade math wasn’t math. It wasn’t even the math speed I practiced on all those mad minutes. It was humility.