With rigid discipline Genius goes through her math assignments each day. She has always liked, and excelled at math, which has made finding a good math curriculum difficult, since I suck at math.

Math Mammoth, is one of the many vendors, who has generously let me try out their curriculum, for the TOSCrew. I was given to use with Genius, the Grade 7 worksheets Pre-Algebra. A little bit of a misnomer, as while some of this is grade 7 math, a lot of it is 8th grade math. Which makes sense since Math Mammoth's next workbook after that is Algebra I, which most students take in 9th grade.

This past month has been a frenzy of activity for us. (I'm sure a lot of you are nodding at this point!). Being year-round schoolers, I did not want to put school aside every time something came up. Math Mammoth has been perfect for this. Since I received the pdf version of these workbooks, I was able to print off a couple of sheets when I knew we would be out and about, and take them with us for Genius. (All the workbooks are available in a print form as well.) While Genius was about as excited as a storm trooper to be doing math on the plane and in the airport, it made me feel good, as I knew there would be a lot of wasted time if I didn't put her to work! (haha).

The sheer number of problems in these two workbooks are astounding. Every topic within 7th and 8th grade math is covered. I know, because of switching schools 3 years in a row, Genius has covered 7th and 8th grade math a couple of times or more! But what is ever so helpful to me is....the answer key! Which every parent who is not good at math, will hold dear to their heart.

The only con for me, as a parent who is not good at math, is that the gold workbooks that we reviewed, or just that workbooks. Nothing else. There is no teaching involved in these. There are no examples or explanations either. Now Genius is quite adept at math, and has been one or two grades ahead of herself since 5th grade, and she thought some of the problems were hard, not necessarily because they were, but because of the wording Maria Miller uses in the word problems, that she was not accustomed to. I too after looking over a question, and then checking the answer key, thought some of the problems were worded in a way that one may interpret them differently than what was intended.

Now, that is limited to the gold workbooks, the blue series and light blue series, all are teaching curriculum. I suppose students who start with those, would have no problems using and completing the gold worksheets.

In any case, Genius prefers we use something else for her math lessons. But this mom, will keep these on hand, for the inevitable time that more practice is needed for a certain topic that she is struggling with, it is a nice handy backup for that. I am always searching over the internet when that happens, and this will for sure get used in the future, saving me a lot of time and grief!

The Math Mammoth pdfs are available for almost instant download at a number of retailers, and are very affordable. The ones we reviewed are $6.00 & $6.50 respectively and the answer keys are only $2.00 more. Maria has a number of packages on her site, that make it even more affordable if you are bundling products. I really recommend these as backups to your current math program, since you only have to print the ones you need it is economical, and reusable for future students. If you have a younger child in elementary school, the blue/light blue series books, may be worth trying for a whole curriculum option.