Worksheets are awesome. Imagine the learning that you can do with them.
1.) Ask each student to take the 8.5 by 11 worksheet and create an airplane, in their own design, that will fly the farthest on five attempts. Take those five attempts, and the rest of the class’s data, and do some graphing, data analysis, and comparing numbers. Make a day of it. Allowing kids to research air resistance, wind, aviation, and even the Wright Brothers.
2.) Give the students five worksheets. Ask them to build a structure, using ONLY those five worksheets, that will support a stack of five text books as high off the table as possible. They are allowed to cut, tear, and manipulate the paper in any way they choose and the more out of the box? The better.
3.) Use the back of the worksheet to play a collaborative game of “Scribble.” A small group of students sit in a circle, each with a different color marker, and without speaking, pass the paper, each getting to draw one mark. The paper is passed for about five minutes and the team draws a picture together… without speaking. Afterward, discuss how collaboration and compromise mattered. It’s fun, but it also builds teamwork.
4.) Get out some Sharpies, take the pile of worksheets out in the grass, flip them over, and just sit under the blue sky and dream up ways your students’ can have real, authentic learning experiences. Solving community issues. Raising awareness for a cause. Record your thoughts on a worksheet. Even better, ask a colleague to join you in collaborating on the worksheet.
5.) Give kids ten minutes, in a small team, to develop a scale model of our solar system so they can understand the relationship between the size of Jupiter, the Sun, Earth, and so on. They’ll also be working on scale model in the process. The worksheets can be used to cut up to create the planets and make them to scale. It won’t be easy for kids to figure out a scale that will work or to get all on the same page in what scale to use… but learning? It’s not easy. Wait til they see how tiny Earth really is. It’s something they don’t notice when they see a diagram of the solar system, but when they build it? They see it.
I don’t really think worksheets are awesome. We have to be careful of asking kids to fill in blanks or search for words. We have to be even more careful of exchanging exploration and play for wrote memorization and things we can put stickers on. Instead, we need to be encouraging thinking, creativity, collaboration, and authentic learning. The kind that’s far bigger than a copied page from a workbook. The kind that’s built on experiences in the world.