The actual way to handle Pizzazz math worksheets
Most people who pull out a Pizzazz math worksheet expect it to be some kind of game, but it's really just standard order of operations practice wrapped in a puzzle format. The instructions are usually straightforward: solve a problem, find the answer in your answer key, fill in the letter that goes with that answer, and decode a joke or riddle at the end. The trick is that if you mess up even one problem in a chain, every answer after it gets wrong and the punchline doesn't make any sense. Order of operations is PEMDAS or BODMAS depending on where you learned it. Parentheses first, exponents, then multiplication and division from left to right, then addition and subtraction from left to right. The Pizzazz worksheets don't introduce anything new conceptually, they just give you a bunch of problems in a row and tell you to color or fill in answers based on which choice matches. I went through this with a group of middle schoolers a few years ago and hit a wall with one particular page where the order of operations problems included nested parentheses and fractions in the same problem set. The worksheet had something like (12 + 6 ÷ 3) × (8 2²) mixed in with simpler problems. One student kept getting 48 instead of 36 on that problem because he was multiplying before dividing inside the first set of parentheses. He just saw the numbers and multiplied 6 times whatever came next instead of dividing 6 by 3 first. It's a really common mistake, and the Pizzazz format makes it worse because you don't get immediate feedback on just that one problem, you get a broken puzzle at the end.
What I ended up doing was making them solve each problem on scratch paper first, write the step-by-step work, and only then check the answer key. It adds about three minutes per problem but it cuts the error rate down significantly. Otherwise they're guessing and the decoded message looks nothing like English. There's also the question of whether Pizzazz actually makes order of operations easier to learn. It doesn't. What it does is make it slightly less tedious because there's a payoff at the end. The cognitive load is the same as a standard worksheet, maybe higher since you're also tracking which letter maps to which answer. If your goal is genuine mastery of order of operations, practice problems with immediate feedback and error correction will serve you better. Pizzazz is more of a motivator than a teaching tool. The answer keys are widely available online, usually scattered across education websites. Look for the specific book title and page number, since Pizzazz has different series covering pre-algebra, algebra, and geometry, and the order of operations ones are usually in the pre-algebra track. The most common editions are the ones published by Evan-Moor, and those tend to have the keys on the last page or in a separate teacher edition.
One thing that trips people up is the left-to-right rule for multiplication and division. A lot of students will do all the multiplication first and then all the division, which gives the wrong answer. Take a problem like 20 ÷ 5 × 2. Doing division first gives you 4 times 2, which is 8. Doing multiplication first gives you 20 divided by 10, which is 2. The answer is 8 and that's the difference between knowing the rule and just memorizing the acronym. Pizzazz worksheets don't usually call this out, so you're on your own to catch it. Another edge case that comes up is when exponents and multiplication appear together, like 3 × 2³. The exponent has to be evaluated before the multiplication, so it's 3 × 8 = 24. Kids will often multiply 3 by 2 first and then cube the result, getting 216. This is especially relevant in Pizzazz sheets that stack several different operation types in one problem row. You can see it happening in real time on a worksheet if you watch someone work through it. If you're looking for more structured practice beyond what Pizzazz offers, I'd suggest pairing it with something like Khan Academy's order of operations module or the work from Math Aids dot com, which lets you generate custom worksheets with nested parentheses and fractional exponents. Those resources give you the repetition that Pizzazz doesn't, without the decoding distraction.
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The bottom line is that Pizzazz math order of operations worksheets are fine for building fluency if you use them as a check rather than the primary learning tool. They're not wrong, they're just not particularly efficient for actually teaching the concept. The format works best when you already know what you're doing and need something low-stakes to keep your fingers moving.
