We appreciate receiving your feedback. Please email your comments or suggestions to the author Frank Ho at fho1928@gmail.com.I have been teaching math to kindergarten to grade 12 students for the past 21 years every night, seven days a week at the Ho Math Chess Learning Centre based in Vancouver, Canada. I have encountered many problems, including some of the following: -The traditional computation worksheet format is boring. Many research papers have been published to show us how to teach math, but when it comes to having some practice sheets, the choices are few and far between. None of them could have any earth-shattering styles.
-I teach in an environment that is very different from regular day schools because I could have students ranging from grade 1 to grade 6 all in one class. However, I tried hard to have a similar background of students gathered together. Sometimes it is not possible because students have other lessons to go to. Most of my students have after-school classes almost every day.
-Some students can only do very basic calculation sheets, yet some of them need to be challenged on advanced word problems, including math contest problems. How can I teach students with such a diversified background?
-Children not only need to learn math, but some of them also need to do puzzles to activate their brains and increase their IQ.
With the above in mind, I created many separate workbooks, including basic calculation, word problems, puzzles, and I even incorporated chess moves into my math worksheets. With all these efforts, ironically, I created an additional challenge for myself, which I have to use four workbooks to teach one child. In 2015, I started to pay attention to Chinese after-school learning centre's teaching materials and started to compare their teaching materials with our North American materials. At the same time, I researched the materials from Singapore, Taiwan, and puzzles from Japan and Britain. These analytical researches have led me to have an idea to combine all my published workbooks into one giant workbook, which includes math contest problems, IQ fitness, word problems, and chess and math integrated worksheets.
