Reading Eggs Workbook (A Homeschool Review Crew)

For the last few weeks, Garrett has been using 200 Essential Reading Skills for Third Grade, one of the newly released workbooks from Reading Eggs designed for students Kindergarten thru 5th Grade.  

Each page of these workbooks corresponds with the Reading Eggs or Reading Eggspress online lessons.  The work books for Kindergarten and First Grade covers the lessons in the Reading Eggs program while the workbooks for 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th Grades cover those lessons found on the Reading Eggspress program. (Also offered are workbooks for grades K-2nd that work with the MathSeeds program).

200 Essential Reading Skills for Third Grade is a 217 page, full-color workbook that not only provides practice for students to develop reading comprehension skills but also includes spelling practice and grammar lessons in 32 weekly lessons as well as 4 weeks of review.  A Day by day table of Contents located at the front of the book as well as a year planner for the full 36 weeks of instruction lay out the entire scope and sequence for the curriculum.

Calling itself Three Books in One, each weekly lesson is covered over the course of five days - Days 1 and 2 focus on reading comprehension skills, days 3 and 4 focus on spelling and expanding vocabulary skills while day 5 is designated for grammar.

Each day's lesson is one page in length and contains various activities to help skill building.  Day 1 reading comprehension activities include annotating short reading selections and answering multiple choice questions related to the text.   Day 2 includes similar activities but switches from a multiple choice answer to short answer responses.  Spelling activities each week have the student first focus on 20 words that fall into a similar rule or spelling pattern on Day 3 and then follow up with 10 "Challenge" words that also fall in suit with the first 20.  Finally, on Day 5, activities focus on grammar lessons such as parts of speech.

Review activities are also included in the book.  These reviews are included after every 9 weeks and serve as a way to gauge if the student has learned the previous skills before moving on.  These reviews are also 5 pages in length and include review activities for spelling, grammar and reading comprehension.

Answer keys to all activities can be found in the back of the book, eliminating the need to purchase any other materials.  The workbook can be used as a stand-along product.  However, Reading Eggs has aligned these workbooks to work in conjunction with the activities on ReadingEggs.com.  Lessons in the workbook directly coincide with the maps on the online program.

For most of the weeks, the reading exercises are taken from excerpts from stories found on the Reading Eggs website as part of the Eggs Eggspress program.  These selections are indicated on Day 2 at the top of the workbook page, inviting students to read the entire story.  Students can then log into their account, click on the library and finish the story.

How We Used It

Timing would have it that this review came at a good time for us to start the curriculum only a few weeks before the actual start of our school year.  This meant that I was able to easily incorporate this into Garrett's language arts classwork.  As Garrett was not only already familiar with Reading Eggs but also really likes doing Reading Eggs,  this also meant that I had very little issues with getting Garrett to do his work each morning.  I simply tell him it's time for English and he comes to sit on my bed where it's nice and quite and he can concentrate and he spends a good 15-20 minutes working on his page.

The 1 Page a day, 5-day format has worked really well for Garrett.  It allows him to know what to expect to do each day and he also knows that he won't be doing large amounts of reading and writing for extended periods of time. Each day takes him roughly 20 minutes a day, a bit more on days we log into the Reading Eggs website in order to read the digital book that accompanies the lesson.

The reading comprehension and spelling is on par to the level where Garrett currently works at.  The grammar portion is slightly below Garrett's level but would be perfectly on par for where a third grader would be working at.  This hasn't been a problem however, as the grammar section provides a great review for Garrett, making Fridays (Day 5) his "easy day"..

I've been highly impressed with this workbook and I know it has quickly become a favorite addition to our school day for Garrett.  I also re-newed our Reading Eggs Suite Membership (which gives us access to Reading Eggs, Reading Eggspress as well as also MathSeeds) so that Garrett can both reinforce what he's learning with the corresponding Reading Map - for those who already use Reading Eggs, this Third Grade book beings with Map 61 and "Shugg's Pet Octopus".

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For more information about the Reading Eggs website and the Reading Eggs Workbooks, please visit their website.  You can also find more information on the following social media sites:

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Math Refresher for Adults (A Homeschool Crew Review)

Anyone who has read my blog for any period of time knows that math is NOT my subject. I had to repeat Algebra in high school and I barely scraped by to pass Algebra 2 my senior year.   As much as I loved the sciences, I was too scared to take chemistry and physics because I was told that I would not do well because I struggled with math.   Even as a respiratory therapist, I needed to use algebraic equations to properly set medical equipment (the Servo 900C ventilator anyone?) and there were times I was extremely intimidated having to do so, because I feel so crippled by my math abilities.

Because of this, I do worry about how I will handle teaching the kids when I'll probably be learning right beside them. While I'm not going to go trying to teach myself Trigonometry or Calculus anytime soon, there have been times that I have needed a bit of a refresher on how to work a particular style problem. In those types of cases, I am glad to have references such as Math Refresher for Adults from Math Essentials to fall back to in order to refresh (or even teach) myself.

Math Refresher for Adults was designed to help adults to master essential, foundational math skills
that they will need in their lives.  The "lessons" are short and use simple to understand language  and the purchase of the book also provides access to video lessons for even more reinforcement.

The 270 page paperback book, written by Richard W. Fisher covers general mathematics as well as pre-algebra and algebra skills. A detailed table of contents provides an easy way to look up exactly what you are needing to brush up on.

Covered Topics include:

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

The final 45 pages of the book include solutions for all problems, as well as a glossy of mathematical terms, a list of important symbols used in math that many might not be familiar with, and finally a few various helpful charts such as Square roots.

While not actually lessons per say, each page contains a section of Helpful Hints to help guide, step by step, how to solve the problem.   Online video tutorials for a more in depth audio/visual instruction are available on a supplied website, however, these videos were designed to use with previously published books.  The information is there to watch, but you will have to search for it as there's no quick access directly to the section of this particular book.

How I Used It:

While the book provides room to write in, I opted instead to write the problems and my work out on loose paper.  I figured this would be smart so that when I forget once again how to do a particular problem, I can again revisit it and work the problems again without having to erase or already have the answers.    So with my paper and pencil, I would retreat to my bedroom and work through a page or two of problems.

I'll admit, I started from the beginning, which was just basic whole number addition.  Granted, it wasn't 1+1=2.  The first lesson starts with multiple digit column style addition.  I can do those pretty well (although I will admit to using my fingers from time to time haha).

Best way to start when you stink at math?  The Very Basics ;)

 From the first set of problems, I've just slowly worked my way through the pages.  While some may want to skip around and only refresh on things they struggle with, I personally feel a bit better easing myself into the waters, so to speak. I'm honestly am that intimidated by math..

I'm actually glad that I started from the beginning, because some of the authors ways of doing math are much different from the way I learned it in school many many years ago.  For example, in the division section, using a problem such as 93 divided by 6.  For me, I would have come up with a quotient that was a decimal - in this case, 15.5.   (6 goes into 93 a total of 15 times with the three remaining, put a decimal point behind the 15, drop the 3, add a 0 to make it 30, 6 divided into 30 bein 5 for a final answer of 15.5).

 However, the method this particular book does early in the book has you simply making a notation that there are three remaining numbers.  Later in the book when decimals are covered, the old method of solving to zero that I learned in school is reintroduced. And while the Reminder Notation is definitely a simple way of doing it, I was REALLY glad I had worked through the book in order or I would have been completely confused when I saw an answer of 15 r3.

Overall, this is a very nice reference to have on hand. I can see it coming in handy when I need to refresh myself on skills when preparing for lessons with the kids.  However, my husband flipped through it a few times and commented that this book would be extremely useful when prepping for the ASVAB test, as it covered much of the same type of math skills that are covered on the military test. 

For more information about Math Refresher for Adults and the other math instruction books offered by Math Essentials, be sure to visit their website.  You can also find them on Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/math.essentials/.