Review: Brain Quest Workbooks

Title: Brain Quest Workbooks
Format: Paperback
Published by: Workman Publishing
ISBN: PK: 978-0761149613
            K: 978-0761149125
            1: 978-0761149149
            2: 978-0761149156
            3: 978-0761149163
            4: 978-0761150183
This Edition Published: 2008
Suggested Retail Price: US $12.95/Canada $16.50


Summary

The Brain Quest workbooks are a series of grade-specific workbooks (pre-kindergarten to grade four).  They are approximately 250 pages long and cover 13 topics including: ABCs and 123s (Pre-K), Patterns and Science (Kindergarten), Phonics and Time and Money (Grade 1), Cursive and Social Studies (Grade 2), Spelling and Vocabulary and Fractions and Decimals (Grade 3) and Geometry and Measurement and Probability and Data (Grade 4). 

Review

Summer is here and the kids are out of school!  Kids love this time of year but I am always mindful of the idea of "summer slide" (when they lose valuable academic skills after three months of fun in the sun).  My kids really like workbooks and have since they were old enough to hold a pencil.  We do them, on and off, all year long but I like them most during the summer months.  Over time, we have tried many, many different types of workbook and our favourites, by far, are the Brain Quest series of workbooks.  So far, my kids have tackled the Pre-Kindergarten, Kindergarten and Grade 1 books and my opinions are mainly based on those three.

There are a few reasons why I like these best:

• Colour - every single page is rendered in full colour.  It feels a lot less like a worksheet at school when it looks so pretty.  Also, every section of the book is colour coded so jumping from section to section is easy as pie. 
• Perforations - the pages in these books are perforated.  I like this because I can pull out a page, lay it on a hard, flat surface, and let the child complete it.  This way there is no struggling to keep a big book open and no flipping to the next page/section to see what is coming up. 
• Writing lines - I am trained as an occupational therapist and I work with kids with fine motor/printing difficulties and so I am very particular about the size and type of writing lines that are employed in workbooks. As these books progress, the size of the writing lines decrease appropriately.  Until Grade 1, there is a central, dotted line for alignment but they are removed for the Grade 2 book.
• Instructions - Starting in the Grade 1 book, when a child would likely be reading the instructions themselves, the instructions are written in age appropriate language. 
• Engaging - the lessons are punctuated with fun activites like colouring, mazes, word search puzzles and crosswords. 

Personally, my only complaint is that these books are American only.  This usually doesn't matter but in the social studies and money sections, I have had to modify the books for Canadian kids.  This was just a matter of changing the word "state" to "province" and keeping a jar of Canadian currency on hand to cover the pictures of US coins with the equivalent Canadian coins.  The Grade 2 book has a huge section about the states and their capitals and I am not really put off by that.  That book comes with a poster of the United States and I think a child of any nationality could gain valuable skills by having to search a map for a specific place, find our something about it (in this case, its capital) and write it on the line in the book. 

Available Online (these link to the Pre-Kindergarten books but there are links to the others on the pages):
Chapters.indigo.ca
See Brain Quest Workbook at amazon.ca
See Brain Quest Workbook at amazon.com
See Brain Quest Workbook at barnes&noble.com