Junior Academic Series - Kindergarten Math Made Fun!
Written: Jun 20 '02 (Updated Nov 20 '04)
Product Rating:
Pros: Colorful, entertaining and educational supplement for academic advancement.
Cons: Some areas aren’t explored enough, color pages make it hard to make copies.
The Bottom Line: Overall I am extremely impressed with the entire Junior Academic series of workbooks. They help ease smaller children into the world of education while keeping it light, simple and fun.
Earlier this week I was startled when my youngest son announced that we needed to go book shopping – again. He gathered up all the books he no longer cared for, grew out of or classified as ‘childish’. Among them were some supplemental home schooling books that I purchased a few years ago when he was in his Looney Tune phase. While they have been completely worn out from cover to cover he insists that he never used them and [direct quote] “Those are baby books mum, so have another baby or get rid of them”. Sorry son, the factory is closed.
The McGraw-HillJunior Academic Series is a wonderfully refreshing line of books that start at pre-school and run through the fourth grade. This is the Kindergarten Math book recommended for children from ages three through five. As with all learning aids and toys, you should be your own guide as to your childs own personal learning curve. Some kids will excel in some areas and be a little behind in others – that is where your parenting skills and intuition come into play. Jump-starting your childs education should be fun so don’t feel the need to pressure them into learning massive amounts of things at a time. Repetition and retention are two of the biggest factors for early learning, but if you make it fun it will be something they will always remember as a fond memory.
The Basics
The Junior Academic SeriesMath Supplement covers numbers and counting, addition, subtraction and basic money counting. Unlike some books, this teaches items in sections. The first major section is number recognition, correctly writing numbers and identifying the number in a multiple-choice scenario where you have to count the items in the square and circle the correct value. One downfall is that there really isn’t enough room for a child to grasp the correct way to write numbers – at most there are two or three spaces next to the diagram. I suggest picking up an inexpensive primary writing tablet and letting the child write out the numbers a few more times.
Shape recognition was one of my son’s favorite things to do in this book. There are several pages the ask you to find the correct shape and circle it. He took it a step further and went through the entire book writing ‘circle’, ‘square’, ‘triangle’ etc under or next to the larger shapes. Mixed in with the shape recognition are “more and less” pages where you are asked to help figure out which character has the most or least amount of items.
The addition pages are extremely fun and include a lot of the Looney Tune characters. The first pages in this section are basic and use both numbers and images for the child to count. As they progress, the images are removed leaving only the numbers. Consider it like having training wheels on a bike and when you have enough practice – off come the training wheels. Again, some kids will find this a snap and others may have a little trouble. Invest in some primary writing tablets and get them off on the right foot.
Money skills come into play for a few pages and are a great way to teach the basics of pennies, nickels and dimes. It does not go into quarters, half dollars or dollars so you will have to get the first grade book in this series for that information. Even for the limited number of pages that deal with money, this helps to establish the worth of the individual coins as well as counting them in groups.
Things To Know
As I mentioned in my review of a few other homeschooling books, this is in color so if you are planning on making copies you might need to play around with the settings. There were a few websites that carried these pages in full color and were completely printable, but the links to them are no longer working. The nice thing about that was that you could click the option to print only in black and white rather than color – saves time printing as well as on ink.
If you find your child has an interest in a certain section or is having difficulty, making copies is a great way to give a little extra help or for an added activity. In this book there are several pages that can be used to make paper math hats, to play a small board game and a rather crude, but functional Looney Tune game – “Pin The Tail On The Taz”. The extremely reasonable price of $2.99 [suggested retail price] makes purchasing multiple copies almost painless so if you can’t get the copies to come out clearly picking up extras is always an option.
There are directions for almost every exercise or activity located at the bottom of the page. It is extremely helpful if you read through the directions with younger children a few times so they understand what is asked of them. There is an answer key located in the back of the book so you may want to remove it before handing the book over to a child. The answer pages are grouped in pages of six on a sheet so they take up a lot less of the book then you think.
At the end of the book there is a listing of books from the Spectrum Series from McGraw-Hill as well as the ISBN numbers and prices. These are books about four to five times larger [in most cases] than this book and range from the kindergarten level to eighth grade. Be sure to fill out the coupon to receive the free newsletter from McGraw-Hill as well, it is loaded with updates, new titles and occasionally coupons for a percentage of your order or free shipping.
Since some of the information is rather basic – such as money skills – you may want to purchase several levels at one time and go through one specific task. In the first grade book from the Junior Academic Series it goes into a little more detail about money and counting change. Personally I found it beneficial to remove all the pages dealing with money and cover them over the period of a few days rather than waiting for him to finish the kindergarten book and move on to the fist grade one.
The pages remove easily and are perforated but I would recommend that an adult remove the pages rather than a child – this will help keep the ripped pages to a minimum. It’s also better to rip the pages from the book so smaller kids don’t get distracted by other characters or designs on other pages. For smaller kids it may seem overwhelming to be handed an entire book – so going page by page helps to ease the into the learning process.
The Bottom Line
This is by no means a complete learning module but it does make for a great way to infuse learning and fun at an early age. This would be great for those that are planning a homeschooling environment or those that wish to simply jump-start their childs educational process. I highly suggest checking out this workbook as well as the entire Junior Academic Series to provide your child with all the educational advantages possible.
The Stats
Name: Junior Academic Series - Math
Published By: McGraw-Hill
Pages: 80
ISBN: 1-57768-200-9
Author Vincent F. Douglas
Illustrations: Renegade Animations / Arkadia
Price: $2.99
Website www.MHkids.com
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.