Review: Total Math Preschool

Total Math, Preschoolpublished by School Specialty Publishing is aligned to the proficiency standards set by No Child Left Behind. It covers the numbers 0 to 10 with various exercises to teach number recognition and quantities. There are plenty of drawing and coloring activities, which makes it great for developing a preschooler's drawing and coloring skills.

The book covers many premath concepts, such as What Comes Next?, First, Next, Last, One-to-One Correspondence, What Belongs?, What Does Not Belong?, Patterns, Position Words, Basic Shapes (including tracing) and so on.

The book also introduces time and money. Time covers o' clock and half past. Money covers pennies, nickels and dimes and includes counting.

There are a lot of tracing and writing exercises, especially in the numbers section. If you have a 3 year old who isn't ready to write yet, you may want to skip the number section and come back to it later. Or you can skip the tracing/writing pages and work on the numbers exercises.

My one complaint is that there aren't any addition or subtraction activities. Preschoolers can easily understand that you can change quantites by adding or subtracting, so I'm surprised that these are not covered. Total Math, Kindergartendoesn't seem to cover these concepts either, so you may have to look at a 1st Grade book, if you want to do this with your child.

My daughter asks to do workbook everyday. We usually do 5 to 8 pages a day of this book. I recommend this workbook for 3 to 4 year olds.