Scholastic is a long establish brand, and you would think it would be tough to go wrong buying anything with the friendly book logo stamped on the front. I fondly remember grade school and good old Scholastic News like it was yesterday. Maybe.

Many of the other Scholastic books we’ve used here have been real winners. Unfortunately, Scholastic didn’t seem to be firing on all cylinders when it put together the Math Practice series. At forty pages of actual worksheets, the individual volumes run somewhat thin. The worksheets themselves favor a lot of the problem-solve-then-color-the-picture sort of activities, which at least here interrupted the flow of math thinking and seemed inappropriate for my third grader. Worse, if you’ve ever had to go back and make corrections on an activity like this, you know it’s a nightmare.

The pages themselves are bright and in full color, but the graphic design on many of the worksheets was too busy. The math problem/geography mashup in the third grade book that had your kid coloring random regions of the U.S.A. was cartographic insanity. Canada got colored blue, just like the Pacific Ocean and Hudson Bay. Inconsistent font sizes and random positioning of problems made this more of a puzzle than a math exercise. Like many of the other exercises, the intent was there to make something engaging, but it just didn’t work.

A few dollars more can deliver the savvy workbook shopper a substantially greater amount of actual content in a much more useful format. Unfortunately, the Scholastic Math Practice Series didn’t meet Dad’s expectations. Not recommended.