If there’s one thing around here that we burn up more than paper, it’s pencils. And we’ve tried plenty of them. As a result, I’ve become something of a demented pencil snob. My fixation is your gain, however, and I have found what I think is the ideal pencil for my personal pencil cup, as well as a jumbo kid version that’s held up under the most rigorous of Rocket Math worksheet marathons.

Hex barrel pencils have always felt weird to me, so the historical pencil of choice here has been the Mirado Black Warrior. The Black Warrior is widely available and well regarded by most pencil aficionados, but it never resonated with me as more than a basic implement. Recently, however, I wrapped my fingers around a Dixon Tri-Conderoga Black Pencil and fell in love. The Reuleaux triangle shape seems much more comfortable in my hand than either a hex or rounded barrel, and the soft-touch finish felt almost like holding leather. Dixon calls this the “World’s Most Comfortable Pencil” and until I find something nicer, I’ll back them up. The shape encourages you to hold the pencil properly and it doesn’t roll, which is an enormous advantage on a busy desk.

Forest of Triconderogas in Dad's Pencil Cup

Beyond the barrel shape and finish, the rest of the pencil is top notch. The wood is made from incense cedar, which makes it sturdy and aromatic coming right from the sharpener. The 2HB lead sharpens to a razor point each time and a black eraser tops the package off. It’s a work of art, pencil-wise. The black Triconderogas have become standard issue in Dad’s personal pencil cup.

Paradoxically, smaller fingers seem more comfortable with bigger pencils. Fortunately, my Triconderoga pencil fetish uncovered a jumbo kid-sized version that’s great for death-grip, manic-timed math drills. The Dixon Ticonderoga Tri-Write Beginners Pencil is close in diameter to a primary school size pencil, and it’s got a big beefy eraser on the end. I’m sure we’re not the only house where the erasers on the pencils get burned up well before the pencil is sharpened down, and these big erasers definitely help. These are big versions of the real, soft erasers like what you find on a quality pencil, not the crumbly plastic that seems to show up on typical primary-school size pencils. These Tri-Writes don’t have the same soft-grip black finish as their smaller Dixon-kin, but the shape is great for encouraging kids to get their fingers in the right places. We’re still working on that, and the big triangular pencils seem to work much better than the slip-on pencil grips which failed us miserably here.

Face-On View of the Tri-Writes

You do wind up needing a jumbo sized pencil sharper, and you’ll want an electric if you’re really using these in any volume. If you have a pencil sharpener that takes primary sized pencils already you should be in good shape. Unfortunately, the electric pencil sharpener we’ve been using only took the standard #2’s, so we wound up with a new X-Acto School Pro Sharpener with selectable sizes. The Beginner’s Tri-Writes go in the biggest hole and the motor’s strong enough to get a good point on those big logs, but you’ve got to get them in straight.

The only downside to the Tri-Writes is the price and I’ve only found them for order online. They’re on the expensive side on a per-pencil basis especially if you get stuck with a big shipping charge, but they seem to last a lot longer then a smaller #2. It seemed like during homework hour we were working a set of three or four #2 pencils that got resharpened at the start and midway through. Three of the big Tri-Writes seem to get us through on one sharpening now. Maybe at some point I’ll figure out how many worksheets we can get out of a single pencil (that’ll make me popular, I’m sure.) Apart from helping to support the site, if you use the OfficeDepot links in this post you can get free next-day shipping on orders over $50, and it’s easy to get there if you wind up buying a case of paper or other supplies. Even recycling the backs for scratch, we rip through paper here like nobody’s business. Not having to lug cases of paper from the store in and out of my truck is a neat trick, although my UPS guy seems grumpier lately.

Anyway, I hope you give those Tri-Writes a try or if you have other pencil recommendations, drop a comment below… That may well help me hold off on buying any those discontinued Blackwing 602’s floating around on eBay. Just for comparison, you know. Pencil dementia, indeed.

Links:

Dixon Ticonderoga Tri-Write Beginners Pencil (Ultimate Pencil for Kids)

Dixon Tri-Conderoga Black Pencil (Ultimate Pencil for Parents)

Color! Wonderful Color! If your kids need bright, attention snaring, grab-your-eyeballs-and-look-at-this! graphics on each page, this volume might be the one for you.

At over 200 actual worksheets, the Scholastic 100 Math Activities books have a heft and girth to them. And, let’s not forget the advertised “nearly 500 full-color illustrations and photographs.” There’s a lot going on here. It borders on too much for this Dad, but my oldest was enamored by the full color turkey photograph that augmented one of the subtraction activities.

The workbook content covers a wide range, including basic arithmetic operations, introductory fractions, measurement, geometry, time and money problems. Some worksheets are weak in terms of educational value, but there are a lot of gems. The actual mechanics of basic arithmetic operations are explained on some sheets, which is a real plus. The end section on probability and data organization is particularly well done. Topics are grouped by chapter with individual answer keys. Each chapter also includes a game activity of some sort to reinforce the skills learned… We haven’t found the games particularly useful since you need one someone else at the same level to play against. If you have twins maybe?

The book is printed on newsprint type paper with perforated tear-out pages. You’ll still want to use a ruler to get a sheet cleanly out of the book. Some of the activities are two pages, so be sure to look forward a page before ripping one out or the you’ll get to play find-the-missing-half-of-this-worksheet later.

There’s a sheet of “reusable math stickers” in the center of the book, but they’re just numbers and operations. The stickers don’t actually stick to paper, and probably are meant for windows or dry erase boards. Dad recommends removing this perforated page before presentation to young ones who may not fully appreciate your time to remove shredded bits of fine plastic from the roller brush on the vacuum cleaner.

The Scholastic 100 Math Activities Kids Need to Do series provides a solid assortment of exercises, especially if you’re looking for something more colorful than the Dorling Kindersley materials. It’s not a hard-core arithmetic volume, but does make a friendly complement to work coming from other sources. And did I mention the turkey? Recommended.

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.

Of all the challenges lined up around the math skills track, fractions can be one of the more difficult hurdles to clear. You’ll need help. Fortunately, Dan Greenberg’s cadre of fraction heroes are on hand. If Martha Crunch, Enid the Magnificant and Joe Trella, Fraction Fella, can’t clear the fog of fuzzy fifths and quirky quarters, you’ll have to call in the big guns. Of course, I mean Texarkana Bernstein, the world’s greatest adventurer, and her trusty dog, Woovis.

Funny and Fabulous Fraction Stories succeeds in presenting fraction concepts in a light hearted, entertaining format. Many of the exercises are similar to those found in other workbooks, but the short stories in each section serve to introduce new skills in an accessible way. You’re still going to work hard closing the gaps in some areas, but many of the characters from these stories will serve as another voice beside yours.

The book includes 30 stories, each with a set of 20 or so problems. The stories start out with basic fraction concepts, progress through operations and end with applications such as probability and ratios. Many of the stories are presented in script-style dialog format, which was unfamiliar to young readers here but we caught on quickly. Most stories are a page or two in length and serve as a nice break between problem solving. Because the stories are deep into explaining the fraction concept at hand, it doesn’t interrupt the math learning process like many of the “coloring break” type activities that other work books often use to hold interest. An answer key for all problems is included in the back of the book.

The book itself is 88 pages and printed in black and white on the newsprint type paper many workbooks use. Make copies of the pages at least for the first use as you’ll probably want to revisit some of the exercises and they won’t hold up under the eraser well. The graphic design is sensible. There are side bars and end caps with either more explanation or jokes that break up the problem sections in a non-distracting way. While the book is a bit on the slender side, it’s a great value for the quality of its content.

The bottom line is you can’t get enough help with fraction concepts, and Funny and Fabulous Fraction Stories provides a group of clever characters to lend a hand. Strongly recommended, by both Dad and Woovis.

The Dorling Kindersley Math Made Easy workbook series is one of the better investments the DadsWorksheets.com family has made. Each book in the series contains just over 150 pages of exercises tailored to grade-appropriate knowledge levels. We’ve worked through three of the series here and as we move up grade levels, these books are definitely one of the core resources at home.

The problem density in these books is very high. Several other books we’ve used have only six or eight problems per page, with a lot of margin fluff. While some of the problem pages that require illustrations or charts may be light on the problem count, most of the pages in the DK series have substantial number of actual exercises. Coupled with the high page count, you really get your money’s worth.

The content covers a wide and useful range of topics, and its reinforced as you move from book to book in the series. Apart from basic operations the series covers chart reading, money, fractions, measurement, symmetry, geometry, word problems and more. A complete answer key is included in the back of the book. The topics are repeated within each book, which means working cover-to-cover isn’t repetitive… There’s no getting stuck in a chapter that focuses on a narrow set of topics. You’ll appreciate having a change of pace the first time one of your kids works through a page full of problems somewhere.

The worksheets themselves are fairly plain and printed using a two-color process (blue and black.) Some friendly illustrations adorn most pages, but you wouldn’t characterize these as colorful or verly engaging visually. The focus here seems to be on the actual math, which suits Dad just fine here. The books come with a set of gold stars that can be used to mark off the pages as they’re completed or graded (Your mileage may vary. iTunes credit worked better as rewards here.)

The book is printed on a stout paper stock, and is put together with a sturdy stitched signature binding. You won’t be tearing any pages out of these volumes, either accidentally or by intent. The paper is slightly slick and holds up extraordinarily well under erasure. After suffering with a pile of newsprint-type workbooks, I’m amazed that someone seems to have put so much thought into the production quality of these books. Some of the $50 books I use professionally aren’t this well put together.

Overall, the Dorling Kindersley Math Made Easy books are worthy of Dad’s highest recommendation.