Kuta Love

Have you been using kuta software?  If not, you need to go download the free trial right now.  If you already know about it, feel free to skip this post because you already know how awesome it is.  I must warn you though that once you use it, you may not be able to live without it.

What is it?  It's really simple.  As they say it's:

And that's exactly what it is.  It's a program that generates worksheets and answer keys.  Sounds like no big deal, but I assure you that it is (for me at least).  Don't get me wrong, I love a good hands-on creative type math activity.  But I also love practice.  Kids need to practice skills in order to master them. Kuta software gives you all the practice you could ever want.  

If you don't want to download it, at least go check out their free worksheets.  They have ready made worksheets in almost every topic you can think of in pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, and algebra 2.  When they say "No Fluff" they mean it.  You can't change fonts, colors, or anything like that.  It doesn't look pretty or anything, it's just solid math problems.  All of the worksheets look something like this:

Nothing fancy. Just math.

When you download the trial or if you buy the actual program you can create custom worksheets and you can really tailor the problems to be EXACTLY what you want.  For example, if you're making a worksheet of solving equations you can check boxes to turn off and on the following settings:

• use integers only
• use decimals
• use fractions
• variables on left side
• variables on right side
• variables on both sides
• distribute once
• distribute twice
• choose the range of numbers that will be used
• include special cases

And this is only one topic.  It's so quick to use.  You don't have to dig through lists of problems and choose the one you want, they're all generated based on formulas so you just tell the program how many of each problem you want and you're done.

I also really love the ability to create different versions.  When you choose to print, you can just type in how many different versions and it will automatically create that many different copies.  I absolutely love this for something like integer practice that is so easy to just copy.  You can even choose to take off the version numbers so that the copies really look the same (unless you look at the problems of course).  This is an awesome way to catch kids cheating on homework.  They don't look carefully enough to realize that I've passed out 3 or 4 different versions and it's clear they didn't do the work when they hand in the answers to a different version.  Gotcha.

Seriously there is SO much I love about this.  I could go out about this forever, but you should go check it out yourself.  It's also not all that expensive for a school to buy.  I wouldn't buy it myself because that's a little bit of a stretch, but I would try to talk you supervisor into it :)

*I know this kinda sounds like an advertisement here but I promise you it's not, I just really love it...it makes my life so much easier.

Ok this is so random but one time I was watching a TV show and the teacher was handing out a worksheet to the kids and I recognized the worksheet so I paused the show and took a picture of the TV.  Is it weird that I'm this into a program that makes math worksheets? Yes, I'd say so.  I never claimed to be normal though :P

In case you were wondering this is one of the free worksheets from the Algebra 1 page, it's on multiplying polynomials.
Oh you weren't wondering? Well now you know anyway.