Earnings Per Share Worksheets

Price-to-Earnings Ratio Worksheets

We’ve been having fun learning more about some stock market math and I’ll keep expanding this section in conjunction with traditional topics…

More math worksheets to come soon!

It’s an oldie, but a goodie and one we’ve used a few times here before…

The MegaPennyProject

When we start discussing topics with very large numbers, for instance the finance worksheets from earlier this week, or atomic dimensions in chemistry, it’s helpful for kids to relate it to something familiar and physical. In a more adult context, I heard someone asked in an interview to estimate the number of pennies it would take to span the Golden Gate Bridge, which in case you were wondering…

Imagining physical sizes of things is a great tool, even for adults. And if you can take those thought experiments beyond the usual “how many jellybeans in the jar” questions that can be demonstrated in real life, into the realms of “how big would a million pennies be?” it helps make these millions, billions and zillions all a bit more meaningful. The illustrations at the MegaPenny project are a fun place to start.

Math plays a heavy role in finance and investing, perhaps even a bigger role than in the core sciences. A key goal in raising our girls is to make sure they grow up not just math literate, but financially literate as well.

Stocks, bonds, mutual funds and their derivatives are all plenty confusing when you get started. We’ve been investing for college for some time, and I’ve used that as an opportunity to explain the abstract ideas of “owning part of a company” as being equivalent to stock or “buying part of a loan” as a bond. Getting right down to the price of these market beasties is a whole other game, though.

Even some adults I talk to are confused about the prices of stocks. I had a family member tell me they wouldn’t buy Google’s stock because at $600 per share it was too expensive. They only bought stocks that were $10 per share or less. It dawned on me that the connection between market capitalization and stock price (and why this had nothing to do with “expensive” or not) was something I’d need to teach my girls early in their investing careers.

Just like any other big asset, a company has a value on it. This is something that’s only partially captured in the stock price because it depends not just on how each share of stock is priced, but also (importantly) on how many shares of stock are out there. Each company decides how many shares it issues, and if there are lots of them out there, then everything else being equal, each one is going to be worth less.

Consider IBM which was trading for $188 a share recently. IBM has issued about 1.1 billion shares of stock, so if you multiply those numbers, you could in theory buy all of IBM for something like $200 billion. Hang on while I put away my checkbook.

Now consider GE, which was trading for about $20 a share recently. GE has issued just about a ten billion shares of stock (in other words about ten for every one shares of IBM). If you multiply these figures out, you get something like $200 billion, just like IBM.

So, in other words, people buying and selling shares of IBM and GE think these two companies are worth roughly the same amount of money, even though their stock prices are an order of magnitude apart. The price AND the number of shares outstanding tell you the total value of the company. Today’s share price alone doesn’t tell you if one stock is expensive compared to another stock… It only tells you how much the price might have changed recently.

Reliably determining if a stock is priced reasonably is another question entirely (if you figure that out, be sure to let me know in the comments!), but plenty of people use statistics and ratios to help make better comparisons between companies. We’ll explore those in some later worksheets, and I’d like to do a ‘kid friendly’ introduction to those topic soon, but for now a good start is to learn that most of those statistics are in terms of per-share values. Understanding the value of a business itself really requires that you know what market capitalization is (number of shares x share price) and how to move between its components.

Enter the market capitalization worksheets…

Market Capitalization and Share Price Worksheets

Hopefully these investing word problem worksheets provide a solid start to your young capitalist!

Reader Ann McCarty pointed out some duplicate problems showing up on the Analog Elapsed Time worksheets, specifically the sets that all start from noon and add either whole hours or hours and minutes.

All of the elapsed time worksheets should now show much more variability in problems selected on each sheet.

Analog Elapsed Time Worksheets

Raise your hand if one or more of your new year’s resolutions are “get in shape” or “lose weight” or “By Halloween, look just like Gerard Butler for that Spartan warrior costume I’ve twice now skipped in favor of the Energizer Bunny suit.” What? No?

The sad news from the scale this morning is that I’m 16 pounds away from my resolution goal weight, and while I’m making progress already, it’s slow. I saw a Science Channel program where a guy lost something like 12 pounds in one day. By swimming the English Channel. Still, I can do this.

To get motivated, I decided to do a little math. Mayo Clinic says there are 3500 calories in a pound of body fat, and the elliptical machine is reporting that I’m burning calories at a rate of 800 per hour, so a little unit conversion math would surely tell me I could work this weight off with a couple of days of serious commitment…

Ouch. These are not the results you were looking for, Obiwan. In fact, my left calf just developed a cramp I think to make darn sure my brain was on the same page with the the muscular/skeletal system’s assessment of these figures.

And, you know, thinking more about it, that Energizer Bunny suit was awfully slimming.

Division Flash Cards Divisors 10, 11, 12

Division with Remainders Flash Cards

Additionally, the previous division flash cards have been updated so that the answer hint at the top of each card (the side you’re looking at while you show it to your student) is no longer in the division box format and now (cough) actually shows the quotient.

Also, a quick set of flash cards for common exponents can be found at this link…

Flash Cards for Common Exponents

Have a great week!

Thankfully, LifeHacker has a nice guide to freeing up a little extra room on the printed page to get some cleaner output…

How Can I Get Rid of the URL and Other Header Text When I Print Web Pages?

Thanks Adam!

If you’re like our family, flash cards have been a staple activity in the backseat of the car. I’m hoping this is setting an example for appropriate and fun things to do there well into the teenage years. Contemplating the future as a Dad can be stressful sometimes.

The cards themselves aren’t happy either. They get mangled in the seat mechanism, trampled under foot, used for impromptu note paper or sucked out the window. If you’re on the move with flash cards, you’d better plan on them being essentially disposable.

Enter Dad’s printable flash cards! No more worries about lost math facts! Need extra practice for a troublesome problem? Mix a few extra cards in. And actually, because of the way the site lays sheets out in multiples of four, each set already includes duplicates of the more difficult facts in each series, clearly marked so you can remove them if you want.

You can find the new flash card sheets here…

Free Printable Math Flash Cards

To make them up, simply print the worksheet side, then flip the page over and print the answer key side on the back. Reversing margins across printers can sometimes be imprecise, but there’s plenty of slack in the borders to get consistent results. Use a slightly thicker paper so the cards are easier to handle and the reverse of the card doesn’t show through.

One other bonus we’ve found here is the ability to print cards in different colors. The Wausau Astrobrights Paper is a fun staple around here and works well through the printer for projects like this.

I’m toying with using a set of green cards in general, and then sorting additional red facts in for problems that we seem to be missing. Making a “get the red out” game I’m hoping will make flash card drills a little more interesting, and might make initial recall of the missing fact a little easier. We’ll see. If you come up with other flash card ideas, leave a comment and let everyone know.

Worksheets for Conversion Between Customary and Metric Lengths

I’d hoped to have conversions for volume measurements to help with those complex Thanksgiving recipes… Watch for these soon!

A few other updates were made to fix some minor grammar problems in the Money Word Problem worksheets… Thanks to the several folks who pointed this out.

I’ve also had a few more reports of people with worksheet printing problems, all of which seem to be related to the new Google PageSpeed caching service I setup over the summer. I’m going to try cranking a few settings down to see if this helps, but if not I’ll bite the bullet on some more expensive hosting to support the traffic without using this. Thanks for everybody’s patience working through these issues.

Meanwhile, I wish you and your families all a Happy Thanksgiving!