Mastering Essential Math Skills
Grades 4/5
Middle Grades/High School

Want to skip a grade of math - seventh grade, to be exact? Numerous math drill books on the market claim they can boost your basic math skills up to peak performance.. But can you stomach the tedious and boring daily drills they throw at you?

Math teacher Richard Fisher decided to take the "dull" out of math computation by writing Mastering Essential Math Skills: 20 minutes a Day to Success. Each year about one third of Fisher's sixth-grade students bypass the seventh-grade math program and move directly to eighth-grade algebra, with the use of this workbook that was written to complement and supplement basic math texts. Lessons are structured to be used as a mental warm-up for the basic math text, adding confidence and motivation.

Each workbook in this series provides short, concise, non-intimidating, self-contained lessons, paced drills and requires only 20 minutes per day. Students not only master math skills, but maintain skills and reinforce them through consistent review built into each lesson.

This 127-page consumable Basic Edition workbook covers the four basic math operations, plus, fractions, decimals, percentages, integers, geometry, charts and graphs, and problem solving. The drills are presented in a 20 minute daily lesson, stressing student involvement and quick thinking. There is no time for day dreaming in these fast-paced lessons!

The one-page daily lesson opens with four review exercises, two speed drills on addition and multiplication, and an oral work through of the review exercises. New material is introduced with two sample exercises and a helpful hint section, before working on 10 problems. A daily word problem closes the lesson.

The workbook contains about 120 lesson in 12 chapters. The chapters included are whole numbers, fractions, decimals, ratios, proportions, percents, geometry, number theory and algebra, integers, charts and graphs, probability and statistics, and a word problem chapter.

The Middle Grades/High School Edition of Mastering Essential Math Skills covers similar material in a slightly faster-paced way for kids who are a year or two older but who still need to brush up on the same basic math and pre-algebra. With consistent review built into each lesson, concepts missed in the basic curriculum will be covered in the daily review or new material section. You definitely will be ready for Algebra 1 after completing either of these workbooks!

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