Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

Work on Math Skills

Math Essentials

Speed Drill Books

Homeschool Review Crew

Do you continue to homeschool through the summer?  There are two subjects that we do year-round.  Those two are math and reading.  My children are required to still work on math skills and read something daily through the times that we’re not doing formal school.  

How we’ve been doing work on math skills this summer is through a series of workbooks from Math Essentials.  These Speed Wheel Drills are workbooks that help your child work on certain skills.  The three workbooks we received are addition, multiplication, and division.  We received all three through the Homeschool Review Crew and Math Essentials so we could give them a go and then let you know what we thought of them. 

About the Program

These workbooks are designed with the goal in mind of instant recall.  This is math by mastery so that when you see a multiplication problem for example you instantly know what the correct answer is.  

Rick Fisher has been a math instructor for over 31 years.  He has used that experience to put together these books of speed wheel drills to help all students master those facts from addition, multiplication, and division. He has books, DVDs, and a world-class online program at AmericasMathTeacher.com where you can learn more. 

The lessons are short and made to be fun and engaging for the students using them.  The main goal of course to master!  You’ll see a major confidence boost in your child when they master these facts!  

Daily use of the books is needed to help master the facts.  There are also helpful hints available in the books for parents and teachers to help encourage and help the student.  

With our speed wheel drills, there are areas to put in how many are gotten correct plus an area to mark what their time was with that drill.  Watch them get faster!

Our Thoughts

I thought I’d go ahead and answer the question that all homeschool moms ask about curriculum.  Come on, you know we do.  Can I copy it?  In this case, the answer is no and one workbook will be needed per student per subject.  However, honestly, after checking out the prices I think you’d pay more for copying the pages than you would buy a new book. 

We received one copy of each of the three books.  That means that I could have three students work on math skills with them.  For us, it took me a bit to decide which child I wanted to have to use the books.  I finally decided on having my 10-year-old daughter work on the division, my just turned 13-year-old son to work on multiplication, and my 8-year-old daughter to work on addition. 

Reasoning!

I wanted to share a bit of my reasoning here.  My 10-year-old daughter probably seems like a weird one to work on division, but she is doing pre-algebra in math and division is a weakness of hers so I thought this would help her cement her skills. 

My 13-year-old son is still struggling with multiplication and I had just been thinking to myself that I needed to get him a multiplication table to fill out.  Well, this is even better because it’s like having 1440 different multiplication tables to fill out!  I know by the time he finishes this book he is going to have mastered it all!

And finally for addition.  My 8-year-old is going into second grade this fall and I wanted her to work on math skills for addition and subtraction over the summer to keep her learning versus have her lose her skills.  So this one was a pretty easy decision for me.  

Kid Thoughts

My kids really liked these workbooks.  I think part of the appeal if we’re honest was having a book that no one else had or had ever had.  In a large family things like that cause a bit of glee.  

As for doing the work, my kids really enjoyed the books and they took the initiative to work on their pages on their own.  They had a lot of fun having siblings time them on their drills and seeing who got their pages done the fastest for the day.  Even though I don’t try to encourage it, my kids are all competitive by nature so that was fun for them.

As the mom, I enjoyed that they were liking their practice and that it helped them work on math skills when they might have rather been outside playing or doing anything but school. I think this is a fun way to work on math skills over the summer and a great way to work on problem areas to help them start the new school year at a better place than when they stopped the last.

Our recommendation is five stars and we love it!  Have you tried these books?  What were your thoughts?  Have you ever done speed drills before?  My kids had never and I think that is what made it even more fun. 

Learn More

You can learn more about Math Essentials and their speed wheel drill books by checking out all of the reviews that are linked up on the Main Blog Post over on the Homeschool Review Crew blog.  Other than their website they don’t have a social media presence yet.