Greater Than / Less Than Worksheets

Two numbers, an empty box, one symbol

That is the whole task, and the narrowness is the point: nothing to calculate, nothing to read, just a judgement about which of two numbers is larger.

Digit count runs from one to six, at two by default. Single digits for a child meeting the symbols for the first time. Four digits or five once place value is the thing being tested rather than the comparison itself. Twenty-four problems a sheet unless you change it, up to eighty.

Equals is off, and turning it on changes the task

By default every pair differs, so the answer is always > or <. Switch equals on and roughly fifteen per cent of the pairs become identical.

That small change makes the sheet meaningfully harder, because a child can no longer answer on a glance at the first digit. They have to actually check, and the ones who had been guessing from the shape of the number are immediately visible. It is worth doing once the symbols themselves are secure.

Where the digit count starts to teach place value

Comparing 7 and 4 is a fact you either know or do not. Comparing 4,271 and 4,208 is a procedure: look at the thousands, they match; look at the hundreds, they match; look at the tens, and there is your answer.

That left-to-right scan is the actual skill, and it only appears once the numbers are long enough to need it. Which is why moving from two digits to four is a bigger jump than moving from one to two, and why it is worth doing deliberately rather than drifting up a digit at a time.

Same seed, same sheet

Type anything into the seed field and those exact problems come back whenever you want them.

Which solves the absent-pupil problem cleanly. Print the identical worksheet next week for whoever missed it, and the assessment is genuinely the same assessment rather than a comparable one. Change the seed and everything reshuffles, so parallel versions for two groups take about ten seconds.

A Year 3 place-value lesson

Twenty-four problems, three digits, equals on, answer key on. The sheet comes back with rows like 427 __ 518, then 803 __ 803, then 692 __ 281.

Pupils compare the hundreds first and only move rightward when they have to, writing <, then =, then >. Ten minutes later the key goes on the board and they mark their own, and the ones who wrote something for the middle row without noticing both numbers were the same are the ones to talk to.

What it does not do

• Comparisons only. No addition or subtraction mixed in.
• Whole numbers, so no decimals, no fractions, nothing negative.
• The digit count applies to every problem on the sheet, so a page cannot mix single-digit and four-digit pairs.
• No word problems and no real-world contexts. Numbers and symbols.

The columns look after themselves: the layout fits as many as it can while keeping every row readable at 11 point or above, so a sheet of six-digit numbers comes out in fewer columns than a sheet of single digits.