If you’re like me, then you are always searching for new and exciting ways to get your students to practice their math facts. While flashcards and mad minutes are useful for memorizing math facts in the first place, these tools can get boring quickly. That’s why I love to use these mystery pictures to help my kids practice their math facts! If you want to get started using them, click here to download the addition pack and click here to download the subtraction pack.
What Are Math Fact Mystery Pictures?
Math fact mystery pictures are an easy and engaging way for students to review math facts. Each page consists of a table with math facts for students to solve or determine whether they are correct. The directions tell students how to color each box. Students may have to color only the correct boxes or color each box a different color based on the answer to the fact. Either way, students have to solve math facts to color in the table correctly. When they are finished coloring, students will find a hidden picture or message (which is why they are mystery pictures!).
How Can Mystery Pictures Help My Students?
Mystery pictures can help your students by giving them a fun way to practice math facts (which can be very boring for kids). Research has shown that repetition helps with memorization, but that application of knowledge helps even more. These mystery math pictures have students both repeat math facts and apply their knowledge of math facts to achieve a goal (finding out the mystery picture or message). As a result, completing them can help students remember their math facts AND they get to have fun in the process. That sounds like a win-win to me!
How Can You Use Mystery Pictures?
You can (and I have) used these worksheets in many ways. They could be morning work (my students always got super excited when they saw one of these at their spots in the morning!), early finishers work, a math station, homework, or a filler activity for those days when there’s not enough time for a lesson but you want to do something useful. However you use them, I recommend using colored pencils or crayons so that you can still see the math facts when each box is colored. If you use markers, it covers up the fact and you cannot check the student’s work as easily. That being said, it’s also fairly easy for students to self-check their work, because if they don’t get each box right, the picture or message will not show up correctly. This is a great way for students to become more independent!
To download my math mystery pictures FREEBIE, click here for the addition pack or click here for the subtraction pack!
**NOTE: I will be adding to both the addition and subtraction packs in the near future, as well as creating multiplication and division packs. If you would like to be notified when those are posted, please fill out the form below to be added to my list of subscribers!**
