Wellness Wheel Worksheet: 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.”

Strangely enough, while plagiarism is a bad idea for a student, it’s a good idea for a teacher. We get ideas from wherever we can. It’s ethical, and it’s encouraged in education classes. If you spend all your time creating material, it leaves little time for anything else. I’ve been guilty of NOT doing this (I like to make my own stuff) and it’s terribly time consuming the first go round. Good teachers find resources where they can rather than constantly reinventing the wheel.Are there downsides? Certainly. Sometimes the resources are bad, or don’t match well with what you’ve been teaching. Also, searchable worksheet often leads to a searchable answer key. Sometimes a weak teacher also can’t answer the questions on the borrowed resources. That’s awkward and should be avoided. (And really, teachers should know the material they teach.)So, not only is it okay, it’s probably a good idea, as long as the resources are good.

Painfully well. I don’t know how you could expect any other answer.I served as a peer advocate for an autism spectrum class during third hour, the designated English period. The typical class day was bound to a routine of rote-learning worksheets (“The next word on our vocabulary worksheet is ‘sit.’ Can you come up with a sentence using the word ‘sit’?” “I sit on a chair?” “Good example! *writes sentence on smartboard* Now copy it down!”) with regular playtime breaks (often spent chilling on a beanbag or playing Happy Wheels on a computer). Fun and easy, but ultimately mind-numbing.I could tell that the kids were barely learning. They were just doing what they immediately needed to, bit by bit, to get to break time—and the teachers were just doing what the curriculum mandated, eager for their own break time. It pained me to see this and know that we couldn’t really do anything about it.I think that by being a friend to them, playing together, partaking in their passions (no matter how trivial or juvenile such interests seemed to us), having pleasant little chats, we peer advocates did much more to prepare these struggling kids for life beyond school than any of those facile vocabulary worksheets.