I was recently sent a selection of Critical Thinking Press books to review from Timberdoodle.com, for each of my little students:

• Math Reasoning Beginning 2 for Jewel
• Math Reasoning Beginning PreK for R.T.
• and Editor In Chief (Level C1) for Nick

We are not a fan of “busywork”, so we don’t have a lot of workbooks in the house. I like these because they are geared towards thinking skills, not rote memorization of facts or lists.

Nick was actually interested in doing the Editor in Chief lessons, when I showed him the book.

Once we did the first lesson, and he got the hang of what they were really wanting, he actually asked to do another one – which turned into two – just to do better and explore it some more. For some children that might be typical behavior, but I assure you that around here that is not usually the case!

As always, we did have some discussions about the finer points of punctuation rules and writing style. With an 11th Grade student, it’s not all as clear-cut as the Little’s punctuation rules.

I think this book would be a great review or supplementation resource for High Schoolers, maybe mostly 9th and 10th Grade. I’d be curious, now, to check out the higher levels in this series.

Each of the Littles is working through their own Math Reasoning book. R.T. is right on age for his, while Jewel is actually a little old for the “recommended age” on the other… But because they are fun and visually appealing activities – and probably because they aren’t doing any other workbook type work – they are having a great time.

So far we haven’t hit anything that either of them doesn’t know, but there’s nothing wrong with reinforcing some of these types of basic concepts (as long as everyone’s having fun). Both book have used the first few lessons to cover counting, colors, and shapes, with the older book having more varieties of each. The older book also moved on to some more sophisticated geometry concepts, and some fun logic and matching games.

I’m not sure if you would use these as part of your primary curriculum, either, but they are certainly a nice “fun” way to get some learning done in spite of Spring Fever.

If you need a late-year pick-me-up for your homeschool curriculum, I’d definitely give all of these a look!

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