Talk to me all about consumable workbooks

[ilovemygirl]

To my surprise my dd is really enjoying using worksheets and workbooks. She pulls them off the shelf and does them herself sometimes but I just have a random selection of some that I picked up at a garage sale once. 

Do you have any favorites? If you use workbooks that are not part of a specific curriculum what do you do with them when your child has finished them? I feel bad to throw them away but that's a lot to just store somewhere too. Is there some kind of dry erase paper or cover or something so that you can reuse it and pass it down to someone?

Thanks in advance for any advice/ideas 

[moominmamma]

What age and stage are you talking about? What subject areas is she interested in? My recommendations for a 9-year-old working at a 7th grade level and interested in advanced math would differ a lot from those for a 6-year-old who is not yet reading fluently and is interested in Spanish, or in practicing handwriting.

As for not consuming consumable workbooks, there are certainly ways to do that. You can use plastic page protectors and have your child work using wet-erase markers. Or you can photocopy the pages and have her work on those. But generally the costs (financial, time and environmental) of doing that make it not worth it for me unless the consumable book contains a lot of information/teaching and just a small portion that's write-in, or unless the workbook is part of a package of other materials that I plan to reuse for a subsequent child and can't cheaply and easily replace just the workbook.

Miranda

[thefragile7393]

Oddly my son loves them too. Spectrum seems to be a favorite...I can't figure that one out

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[ilovemygirl]

Thanks ladies. I forgot to say she is five. She's reading quite a bit though so she can follow the simple instructions in the books to color or write or trace, etc. 

It's not part of any curriculum. We aren't unschooling but are all over the place for now as far as academics go. 

I will go looking for those page protectors. I agree that it's not worth the time and effort to photocopy. As it is the workbooks are cheaper than using up my printer ink to print worksheets from the internet. 

[AAK]

FWIW my children did not want to use the plastic sheets.  Part of the joy of a workbook was seeing it become completed!  My kids loved dot to dot books, mazes (esp. the KUMON maze books), and explode the code (and their earlier books).

Amy

[moominmamma]

Originally Posted by AAK 

Part of the joy of a workbook was seeing it become completed!  

Agree! Without grades to achieve, tests to write, or a sense of transit through levelled school years, the completion of a workbook was one of the few objective milestones my kids could enjoy. They weren't particularly sentimental about the completed books. I usually held onto them until they were well into another one -- maybe three or four months -- and then I'd ask if it was time to pitch it in the recycling bin, and they always said yes. But they did like to feel like they were moving through to the completion of something while they were working in it. Filling the pages up with penciled responses gave them that feeling.

Maybe if we'd used page protectors they would have been happy with a chart that we filled in to show their progress through the book in a permanent tangible way.

Miranda

[onyxravnos]

i generally just pick 'em up as i find them. targets dollar sections, garage sales, the dump, used book stores... etc. I don't worry about coping pages unless it was REALLY expensive. but generally i like themed ones. (dinosaur, space.. etc)

[alicewyf]

My daughter will be 3 in July and already LOVES the Kumon books. I highly recommend them for all age ranges.