Best maths workbooks for home

[Towmcir]

Hi

If you’ve seen my previous threads, my DD has been having huge issues with school, which are now being taken seriously within the school with plenty of support at home too.

We think a large part of the issue is that knowledge gaps have never been identified and worked on, perhaps due to DD struggling under the radar in a higher group than her ability was suited, and a lack on confidence to speak up.

We’ve had massive success with the Mrs Wordsmith books for writing/phonics/literacy and we’ve completed the reception and year 1 books, now working on year 2 just doing a couple of pages/10 minutes a day. She’s so much happier now, even though the content is below the level she is working at at school.

Whilst maths is undoubtedly a stronger subject for DD (teacher is sure she’ll get Greater Depth at the end of the year), I personally still think there’s a lack of understanding for a lot of it due to the way DD works. I’d like to do the same approach with maths to see if this helps, as we’re confident we can help explain topics and just make her more confident about her ability as she’s still very downtrodden.

I’ve looked at maths books and they’re all terribly drab looking from the excerpts you can view, other than a few very specific books on time, shapes etc that are quite colourful.

Does anyone have any suggestions of maths workbooks? Ideally these would cover the curriculum for the year as part of the issue is we don’t know what she should know!

Thanks

Check out maths no problem? There is a textbook (which is quite colourful) as well as a companion workbook. You might be able to get by without the workbook and use activities in the textbook?

we use Cubie on a daily basis to reinforce math skills at home - it is all set out for you for the day / week, dd can pick it up and do it independently. It follows the national curriculum, but doesn’t necessarily correspond with what they were doing in class that week, and a lot of it is revision of core concepts with a little bit of stretch on some days. A possible downside based on what you seem to be looking for is that it doesn’t provide a lot of explanation- great when it is practice, but maybe not if trying to learn new concepts?

on an ongoing basis I prefer Cubie, but over the summer we used maths no problem to fill some gaps and I really enjoyed how it was presented.

Maths No Problem looks quite nice, and isn’t one I’d come across. I think we probably could do without the textbook, but might be worth getting as it looks like it has some questions in and I do think a bit colour helps make it appealing. I might buy some and see how they go down.

Cubie looks excellent, but the cost looks to be really high for our purposes, when we’re looking to recap a few years worth of curriculums to look for problem areas (so hopefully will fly through chunks of it) and gain confidence. I’ll keep it in mind for current year if we get in the habit of doing 10 minutes a day at home and need something else to do.

I hate workbooks, but in honesty I just know that the school hasn’t got time to focus on my daughter and she’ll run the risk of being left behind even though she’s capable enough as she’s had her confidence dashed and doesn’t “show” that she can do things.

Thank you for the Mrs Wordsmith recommendation as well - looks fab! This is exactly what I was looking for last summer, and the vocab resources look really great as well. They have a sale running now (25% off) in case you are looking to stock up for next year.

i also resisted workbooks for a long time (was very solidly no homework) but I do feel like schools aren’t spending enough time on practice/ consolidation of learning- maybe because the pace of the curriculum is too fast/ crowded? - and as a result my dd only half understood a lot of it. If you can find decent materials and make it a routine it isn’t so bad, and has made a massive difference in confidence. There are a lot of dire workbooks out there, though - cgp first and foremost despite all the glowing recommendations.

The Mrs Wordsmith workbooks are a bit different from your standard “dry” workbooks, sometimes they have pages that don’t really have any work to do on the area but it’s easy to make something up to do on the topic using the book as inspiration. I love the focus on vocabulary too, it gives so much more opportunity to discuss.

I also think the CGP books are totally uninspiring. The couple we got are sat unused after a couple of days - I never thought my daughter would choose English practice over maths (she’s not a fan of writing) so it speaks volumes about which workbook she prefers!

@Towmcir did you find some good math resources? I just looked at Cubie and also thought it was pretty expensive.

What Year is your DD at and how did you approach the extra work with her? Do you do the workbooks instead of the schools assigned homework or in addition?

My son is in Year 2 and he's really behind. I bought the Year 2 Workbook from Mrs Wordsmith but I definitely thinks it's too advanced. Was thinking of buying Year 1 but saw you also went through the reception workbook to pick up any knowledge gaps. Would you recommend both?

I'm off work at the minute so now have time in the afternoons to try and review things and get my son caught up.

DD is in Y3, but seems to have very odd gaps in knowledge! We don’t get homework from school other than reading, so I’ve not got that balance to make. We probably spend 10 minutes a night doing this and it’s just routine now.

We started with the reception book because it covered letter formation which was an area we knew we needed to go back to basics on. There is very little actual “content” in the reception book, as they use the space to mainly teach writing and very basic phonics.

The year 1 book and it was pretty easy, part phonics part “English”. We’ve been doing the year 2 book and it is quite heavy - I read up so I’m confident before we sit and do it.

I’ve not found anything great for maths, I’m just making up sums/questions myself which is helping with understanding but I’ve got no idea how much it aligns with the curriculum at schools.

@Towmcir thanks for the reply. I'm going to go ahead and order the Year 1 & Reception workbooks. Thanks for the push.

I wonder if there are any good resources on Twinkl that are free. I feel quite frustrated because the homework should be a recap of what they've done at school but my son is so far behind it's really too difficult and disheartening. He gets 1 reading book per week (ok), 8 maths questions (usually too difficult) and 10 spelling words which he is supposed to look, say, cover, copy 5x (BORING).

I have paid for Reading Eggs and Math Seeds but I'm yet to really use these much with my son. Trouble is he isn't overly interested. Need to come up with some incentives because at this point I can't see how he'll ever "catch up" even though I'm told they do eventually. I think the ability is there but he's June born and had hearing difficulties for half of reception and all of year 1 (on and off) due to glue ear. I don't think this helped.

Best of luck to you, it’s a tough job catching up and it maybe took me too long to realise I’d have to do it at home because my DD wasn’t really failing as such (others in the class were much worse still), just massively underachieving compared to where she could be. Similar story that she had a massive confidence knock which impacted a couple of years and we’ve been rebuilding.

In the Mrs Wordsmith books, we’ve added extra lines by hand so that certain bits can be copied out again.

Twinkl is something I do get a few free things from, but it’s hard to know what the level should be! I looked at a subscription but there was just too much stuff with no real structure.

I like the workbooks as they’re easier to get out and put away quickly because there are no loose pages. It’s also nice to be able to look back through and see progress, and in our house loose papers get thrown away quickly and I’m not organised enough to keep “boring” work, just art.

In terms of motivation, we set a strict expectation for the week and it’s written down to be ticked off. Usually this is a few pages a day. We let our DD get ahead or behind the daily schedule, but there’s no video games at a weekend until she’s up to date. After a wobbly start, she’s got into a routine and is now usually a day or two ahead which she knows means that she can have a “day off” if she really doesn’t want to. I’m not sure she’d have understood this idea so maturely a year ago (she’s also summer born).

I definitely think it’s been worth it as we’ve seen a massive improvement in handwriting and confidence in academics generally.

@Towmcir my workbooks have arrived and I wondered did you literally just start on page 1 of reception and go in order through them all or did you pick and choose a bit from each level?

We did go from beginning to end for the reception book, but really did find there’s a lot of the same type of work in a row.

For the year one book we flicked around a bit more. We knew what to expect and knew they’d be a lot of the same thing in a row! We insisted that the sections were done in order so it wasn’t totally random, and our suggestion was always that we started from the first section.

It probably helped that we were working well behind year group in the books so there was an option to do this without wondering if we were skipping things.

For the loads of letter/digraph pages, we drew in extra lines to copy the words too otherwise the book would have been over quickly!

Ok thanks for the tips!

For maths (& English actually) I like the Collins Targeted Practice Workbooks - you can get one for each school year so maybe start with the year before to look for gaps in knowledge and boost confidence. They're not that exciting in terms of graphics but I've found them clear and it's given me a good understanding of what they should be able to do that school year.

@MigAndMog those look pretty decent actually. I like that you can see a fair amount of content before purchasing. Might give those a try as well. Cheers.

@Towmcir if you were interested in the Collins Targeted Practice workbooks suggested by PP I saw some today at the Works for £1.50. Only reason I didn't buy them was because they didn't have Year 1 & 2 in our branch. It was only Year 3 plus.

Does it have to be books? I'd look at a mathseeds subscription, bit more fun

Oh amazing, I’m often in The Works so I’ll take a look this weekend!

A lot of the issues my DD has comes from putting her thoughts down on paper, and with paper we get a much better chance as parents to see the problems and discuss.

With apps in the past she’s just used trial and error which isn’t ideal and she’s never seemed to enjoy it either.

We’ve had Mathseeds before and found it pretty dull to be honest!

Humble maths from amazon are very good.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-mathematics-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england-mathematics-programmes-of-study

There’s other topics available

Buy some Numicon - it’s visual learning

Bake for weights and measure - use jugs - scales - add take away
make bigger quantities etc

Shapes - be practical - I’m sure you can buy basic shapes - or even education posters for her walls.

Think outside the box - not books

Jist because you learn via writing doesn’t mean she does.

White rose maths