Mathematical Reasoning Review

One of the benefits of homeschooling twelve children is that you can really get your money’s worth out of non-consumable curriculum.

Some of the things we tried with our older children got replaced as newer, better products came along. But we’ve handed other books down from one child to the next, because we’ve been so pleased with the results.

These Mathematical Reasoning books by Critical Thinking Press definitely fall into that category. They weren’t around when our oldest ones were little. So those kids missed out. But we began using them when they first became available over ten years ago, and now we’re pulling them off the shelf again to use with our younger kids and grandkids.

I took one of the newer volumes along with us on vacation last week, in fact, thinking it would be a good thing to keep my first grader occupied on the plane. Little did I know our flight home from Denver would be delayed 21 hours! That gave us enough time to just about finish the entire book.

The beginning levels of Mathematical Reasoning emphasize counting, shape, and pattern recognition. But the concepts get increasingly more complex as you progress through the books (both from start to finish and from one volume to the next).

By design, the books supplement your regular math curricula. They don’t replace it.

Kids can complete most of the pages without marking up the books. I like for my kids to practice mental math, so this is the approach we take. I just have the child point to the answer instead of circling it. That allows us to reuse the same workbooks for multiple students.

The books emphasize thinking and reasoning skills and give students an opportunity to practice using the math knowledge they’ve gained in their regular studies.

One of my favorite exercises in these books are the riddles. The kids really have to stop and think to solve them. My daughter enjoyed those, too, and would thumb ahead in the book to find them all.

Note: Timberdoodle provided one volume of Mathematical Reasoning free in exchange for this review. But we bought and paid for all the other volumes we own ourselves and formed our high opinion of these books long before I was ever asked to review products for Timberdoodle on a regular basis.