Turning tonight's worksheet into twenty minutes of the right practice

Most homework help starts in the wrong place. A child gets a page of twenty questions, gets four of them wrong, and the evening turns into another twenty questions of the same kind.

The four they got wrong are the whole story. They usually turn on one idea — borrowing across a zero, or what a denominator is for — and the other sixteen were never the problem.

Photograph the sheet, say what you want asked, and read the questions that come back. You are not marking; you are looking at which idea keeps failing.

Twenty minutes on that one idea beats an hour of mixed practice, and you can see the difference the next time the same idea comes up.