Mastering Math Skills for First Grade: A Review of a Reading Eggs Workbook

Math is often an area that causes struggles for some children. Finding a good series of workbooks to assist children in mastering essential skills that also aligns with an online resource is fantastic! Last year we reviewed 200 Essential Math Skills for Kindergarten workbook from Reading Eggs that correlates to Mathseeds. This year our six-year-old son is reviewing 200 Essential Skills for First Grade and loving it! There are a series of 9 books from Reading Eggs that just might be perfect for your homeschool.

What are the Workbooks?

These workbooks are good whether or not you subscribe to the online learning programs of Reading Eggs and Mathseeds. We have been able to use them both with and without an online subscription. Right now, we are using the workbook in conjunction with Mathseeds. So, our son is able to fill in the information at the end of the lesson as he completes the activities online.

• 240 Essential Reading Skills for Kindergarten 
• 240 Essential Reading Skills for First Grade 
• 200 Essential Reading Skills for Second Grade 
• 200 Essential Reading Skills for Third Grade 
• 200 Essential Reading Skills for Fourth Grade
• 200 Essential Reading Skills for Fifth Grade 
• 200 Essential Math Skills for Kindergarten (We reviewed this last year.) 
• 200 Essential Math Skills for First Grade (We are reviewing this workbook this year.) 
• 200 Essential Math Skills for Second Grade 

The workbooks provide instruction in age-appropriate skills that will help your child succeed in reading or math depending upon which workbook your child uses. For example, in the 200 Essential Math Skills for Kindergarten our son (and now daughter*) reviewed and practiced recognizing numbers, shapes, geometry, addition, subtraction, and more. 

*Our son started the Kindergarten workbook half way with lesson 26 after working on Mathseeds online during our review last year. So, our daughter is completing the first half of it this year. 

The reading workbooks provide practice and review of grammar, literary skills, reading comprehension, spelling, and more. Just like the math workbooks, these workbooks have full-color pages and a yearly plan. 

What are the Key Features of the 200 Essential Math Skills for First Grade? 

The full-color, 260-page paperback workbook contains 50 lessons, 10 quizzes, 10 fun spots, 11 certificates, pages for the cut-out portions of several lessons, a year planner, and additional learning activities. The First Grade workbook picks up with Map 11 of Mathseeds and goes over many different mathematics skills. Some of these skills include:

• Addition and subtraction
• Telling time
• Measurement: near, far, area, etc. 
• Money 
• Graphing 
• Chance 
• 2-D and 3-D Shapes 

The lessons include a variety of activities like drawing, labeling, matching, completing sentences, using number lines, cut and pasting pictures, and identifying correct geometric shapes, money, and fractions.

The maps line up with the online lessons and provide you with a plan for approaching the workbook. 

How Did We Use the Workbook in Our Homeschool? 

Our six-year-old son will complete part of or an entire lesson each day. He then spends some time on Mathseeds to see what pet is hatching out of the acorn (which we record in the workbook). He also goes through and completes some of the driving tests which are recommended in the workbook. These help him practice the skills reviewing in the lesson.

I am also having our daughter complete the early lessons from the Kindergarten book that were too easy for our son least year. This works out rather nicely as they are both working in their workbooks at the same time and—because the lessons are similar in their set up—it is very easy for me to oversee and assist them as needed. I would recommend using the workbooks across the ages if you have children of multiple ages or skill levels.

The kindergarten workbook featured addition which our son completed last year.

The first grade workbook incorporated additional ways to show addition and subtraction.

The online learning resource of Mathseeds is a wonderful program to use either alone or—even better—with the workbook! It is fantastic to go to the computer and have our son complete the appropriate lesson online after he has completed the assignments in the workbook. There are multiple activities for each online lesson including different games to help review the concept.

Once a student completes a lesson, it is unlocked and available to replay.

One of the Mathseeds activities asks the student to cut the apple pieces in half.

Mathseeds also has portions that are more game-like such as the 'play' section. Our son likes measuring out liquids and creating shapes (plus decorating his treehouse using acorns to purchase new items).

In addition to using the online math component of Mathseeds (ages 3-9), our son has also discovered he really likes Reading Eggspress (ages 7-13). He enjoys reading the books and collecting trading cards and is excelling at working on reading comprehension and learning about themes, plots, and grammar.

Our son just can't stop working on Reading Eggspress. 

Additional Opportunities for Learning 

We incorporated one of the learning activities suggested in the beginning of the book so far: money. I gathered up our play money and the kids reviewed the values and names. They then set up a shop and pretend to sell items back and forth. Learning about money is a very important real world skill and I am glad that 200 Essential Skills for First Grade covers it. 

There are a variety of learning activities listed in the front of the book.

As we are working on money skills, we used a set that was gifted to our son to play shop.

Our son is looking forward to the different lessons on money.

Our Thoughts 

I really like how the workbooks are organized. They are printed on thick paper which means minimal tearing. The text is large enough to read and the spaces are just the right size for the answers. I find the directions to be clear and uncluttered. So far, none of the assignments seems too difficult. Our son can complete most of the work on his own.

Our six-year-old son likes doing the coloring and matching sections. He says the workbook "really helps children with their shapes" and "it also teaches you about colors, time, and where things are. The computer and the workbook teaches you about doubles." He also enjoys doing the fun spot pages and likes when I fill out the certificates.

I asked our son what part in the workbook he is looking forward to working on in the future. He showed me Lesson 76 where students will work with the equals sign. The lesson will ask him to write out addition problems and complete them as well as figure out if sums are equal or not. This particular lesson incorporates dice, dominoes, and even money to figure out if sums are equal.

I recommend the workbooks from Reading Eggs. They are bright and colorful and full of interesting lessons for children. It will be very easy for our son to continue using 200 Essential Math Skills for First Grade during the rest of the homeschool year.

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A multi-award winning online learning program for children ages 2–13, Reading Eggs supports the essential foundations of reading with its highly engaging lessons, games, and e-books!

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If you want to see how other homeschooling families use either the math workbooks or the reading ones, be sure to check out the reviews! 

Reviewing Math Refresher for Adults from Math Essentials

I admit that math has never been my strongest subject. So, when given the chance to review Math Refresher for Adults from Math Essentials, I knew this would be a good fit for me and my family. When our teen needs help with his math homework, his dad usually helps him. By using Math Refresher for Adults, I am feeling more confident in my own math abilities.

There are multiple books available from Math Essentials geared towards elementary-aged students and middle school and high school students, along with books pertaining to algebra and geometry, to name a few.

Richard W. Fisher, the author of Math Refresher for Adults, was a math instructor for 31 years in California. Fisher developed materials that are easy-to-understand and easy-to-use to help students succeed in math.

Math Essentials provides your child with the skills needed to help them build the foundations of algebra. This list of "Critical foundations of algebra [includes]:

• Whole numbers
• Fractions and decimals, including percents, integers, and positive and negative fractions and decimals 
• Some aspects of measurement and geometry." 

All of these topics are covered in Math Refresher for Adults which I find to be fantastic! Knowing that my stepson struggles with math, this is a perfect book to help me point him on the path of success in math.

Specific areas of general math covered in Math Refresher for Adults include:

• Whole Numbers 
• Fractions
• Decimals 
• Percents 
• Geometry
• Integers
• Charts and Graphs
• Word Problems 

Topics pertaining to Pre-Algebra and Algebra include some of the following: 

• Sets
• Exponents
• Scientific Notation
• Number Theory and Lines 
• Slope
• Equations 
• Statistics 
• And more! 

How We Are Using Math Refresher for Adults

During the evenings, after the children have gone to bed, I have worked through one or two pages a night. I started with the first topic of addition and worked through subtraction, multiplying by 1- and 2-Digit factors, and then skipped around a bit to division and geometry. As the two children we are homeschooling are still too young for the math reviewed, I am finding it a great way to prepare for the future when they will be studying higher forms of mathematics.

Video Lessons 

Videos lessons are available for each lesson. At first, I had trouble finding the videos I wanted because they are not listed just for this one book. There are also additional Algebra tutorials available and the access code is provided in Math Refresher for Adults.

As I started with the beginning of the book (because it has been many years since I have had to do math long-hand, without the aid of a calculator), I viewed several of the videos associated with the earlier topics. I found the video instruction to be easy to understand as each example was explained and worked on during the video.

Use by Our Teen 

In addition to working through Math Refresher for Adults myself, I have also asked my stepson to work on pages this summer as a review and refresher of his previous mathematics courses in public school. While I started towards the beginning of the book, I asked him to start with the Pre-Algebra and Algebra topics as he took Algebra I during the 2017-2018 school year.

To start, I asked my teenage stepson to work on the pages that reviewed sets and integers not knowing he hadn't studied sets yet in school. Even though it was new material, he was still pretty successful. He found the helpful hints section to be useful in explaining the difference between infinite sets, finite sets, disjoint sets, null sets (or empty sets), and equivalent sets. He just needed to remember to go back and look at the first page that dealt with sets when he got to problems later as he forgot about null sets.

My husband went over the work with our teenager. As my husband is using it to go over work with our son, he finds it easy to use from a teaching perspective. He highlighted definitions of the various sets with a red pen to help our son better understand them. Our son commented that this helped him better comprehend the differences between types of sets.

Reasons Why You May Need This Book (as stated by Math Essentials – and I agree!)

• "You have a math phobia
• You have forgotten most of the math that you learned
• You want to be able to help your kids with their homework
• You are re-entering the workforce
• You are returning to college and will be taking a math placement test
• You are applying for a job that requires a math competency test
• You are entering a medical or tech field
• You need to improve your math skills to advance your career
• You are preparing for the SAT/PSAT
• You are preparing for the PRAXIS test"

I am very happy to be able to add this book – Math Refresher for Adults – to our homeschool bookshelves because I know we will getting plenty of use out of it as our younger children grow and our teen works his way through more advanced mathematics in high school and maybe college.

I like that if I understand the concept, I can move on to the next topic. 

The text of Math Refresher for Adults is clear and easy to read. Each topic starts with several review exercises (that go over previous material learned in the book), provides helpful hints for the material to come, a set of 10 questions, and one problem-solving word problem. There is little space to work on all the problems in the book, so we used separate paper.

The solutions are provided in the back of the book along with a glossary, a list of important symbols, multiplication table, a commonly-used prime numbers chart, a squares and square roots chart, and a fraction/decimal equivalents chart. I love having all these materials handy! In fact, I will probably pull them out of the book and put them in plastic sleeves to use while working on problems throughout Math Refresher for Adults. 

I think this book will be a welcome resource for any parent or adult who needs to brush up on their mathematics skills. No matter whether you are homeschooling your children or they attend public school, you will find it helpful in working with your children as they progress in their own math studies. It would also be extremely useful for anyone needing to take a placement test – for college, work, etc.

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To see how other families have used Math Refresher for Adults, please visit the Homeschool Review Crew!