Do
Worksheets and games
The Colour Works — 44 printable sheets and 36 games that teach the things the data flags.
The worksheets
44 printable sheets. Seven benches, a cover, a page for the grown-up and a six-page answer key. Prints on letter paper, one sheet per page.
Open the book →The games
36 games, one per sheet. Runs in any browser, works offline, nothing to install. Each card says which sheet it comes from.
Play →What they are, and what they are not
This guide argues against drilling, and these do not contradict it. There are no mock papers, no timed sections and nothing that imitates the assessment — except two sheets that rehearse the shapes questions come in, so a drag-and-drop is not new on the day.
Everything else is ordinary Grade 3 curriculum, aimed squarely at the places the province's own data says it breaks. Teaching those things is not test preparation. It is teaching.
The setting is a paint workshop, and that is not decoration. A ratio is a paint recipe — “one scoop red to two scoops white” is expectation B2.9, the most commonly dropped expectation in Grade 3 and the one behind the released question where Level 2 scored 27% against Level 3's 75%. A child mixing Blush is doing proportional reasoning whether or not anybody says so.
What each bench targets
| Bench | Sheets | The problem it fixes |
|---|---|---|
| Mixing | 3–8 | Additive thinking. A child sees “four times as many” and adds. The most diagnostic error in EQAO's whole analysis. Sheet 4 sorts problems into joined on and repeated without solving any of them |
| Pattern | 9–14 | Rules applied once, then guessed. Sheet 11 is the hardest released question's exact shape — draw the arrows, count the arrows |
| Order | 15–20 | Half-finished answers. Every job carries a “how many steps does this need?” box before the working |
| Word | 21–26 | Vocabulary. Faces and edges counted on a real cereal box; likely versus possible; mode versus biggest |
| Letters | 27–31 | Evidence with no connection. One sentence taught to automaticity: “…, which shows that…” |
| Reply | 32–36 | Writing that stops instead of ending. Plan three parts, land all three |
| Screen | 37–38 | Unfamiliar question shapes. Multi-select, matching and ordering, rehearsed on paper |
Four rules that make them work
1 · Never more than one sheet a day. Two is a chore. One is a visit to the workshop.
2 · Do not mark it. The answer key at the back is for the child to check their own work, afterwards, and only if they want to. A page of red pen turns a workshop into a test.
3 · Say the number sentence out loud. “One to five” beats “times by five” — it is the relationship you want remembered, not the arithmetic.
4 · Real paint beats imagined paint. Where a sheet says to mix something, mix it. Poster paint, food colouring, even two coloured pencils overlapping.
Do sheets 4, 12, 17 and 29 — additive-versus-multiplicative, the arrow habit, the two-step check, and evidence-plus-because. Those four carry most of the value in the book.
About the games
One game for every sheet, in the same seven benches and the same colours, so a child who did sheet 11 on paper meets the same job on screen. Each card says which sheet it came from.
No timers. No losing. No game-over screen. Stars only ever accumulate. A wrong answer costs nothing at all — the page gives a small shake and invites another go. After two tries a Show me button appears, which reveals the answer and awards no star, so there is never a reason to guess wildly or to give up.
There is a settings panel for bigger text and for turning movement off. Everything is keyboard reachable, and the feedback line is announced to screen readers.
Neither resource saves progress when you close it — deliberately, so nothing needs an account and the games keep nothing about a child. The worksheets are paper, and the games are meant to be picked up for ten minutes and put down again.
Colour, and why red plus green makes brown
The mixing in these resources is real paint mixing, not screen mixing. Red and yellow make orange. Blue and yellow make green. Red and blue make purple. Red and green make brown.
Screens add light, so they behave differently — which is exactly why the first sheet asks a child to mix red and green with actual paint and write down what happened. Being wrong about it once, physically, is worth ten explanations.