Summer Brain Quest: Between Grades 1 & 2 Paperback – Sticker Book, April 18, 2017

These Brain Quest books came highly recommended by a fellow homeschooling mom and I decided to try them out for myself.Honestly, I can’t say enough good things about them. I bought one for my daughter to work on over the summer. She will be going into the second grade this fall, and this book is the perfect difficulty level for her. The pages are vibrant and full of engaging pictures, the book is thick and durable, and one of the things my daughter loves most is that she gets to add a sticker to her progress map each time she completes a page. She begs me to let her work on her brain quest book EVERY DAY. Once we get started, she keeps asking, “Can we do just ONE more page?”I am pleased to report this book exceeded my expectations and has been such an enjoyable way to keep my daughter’s mind engaged and motivated to learn during our summer break.I will be using these every summer from now on!

I purchased this Summer Brain Quest book for grades 1-2, and it’s fantastic! It’s full of fun activities that keep kids engaged while reinforcing what they’ve learned.The colorful illustrations and varied subjects make learning exciting. Perfect for preventing the summer slide! Highly recommend it!

Love that it has a progress map. Helps keep the kids motivated which is great during the summer when they don’t want to do homework. A lot of drawing in the grade 1-2 which my daughter doesn’t like as she isn’t a great artist so I let her have the choice of writing out a sentence if that’s easier for her than drawing some of the pages. Answer key in the back is helpful for the older ages when sometimes I don’t know all the answers.

My daughter loves the exercises and is motivated by the progress map, and stickers you earn for completions. Good mix of content, shes going into first and its grade appropriate, especially if your kiddo can read the instructions themselves. Worth the money, was inexpensive and provides hours of fun!

I love the game format of this book, and so does my kiddo. We're unschoolers, and have never done sit-down workbook style learning at all.The last few summers we've done our library's summer challenges, which were super fun, with a variety of activities, but recently, we moved, and the library in our area does a very dull 'minutes of reading' summer program, which just doesn't feel like the fun we were used to (we already track our reading minutes for our homeschool documentation). So I got this to fill in the gap.Kiddo bought into the whole thing really quickly, and we are having a good time going through it. I did get the previous grade level book for my kiddo, because kiddo has some reading delays, and I didn't want our first workbook experience to be a frustrating one.So we are moving through it at a decent clip, and in general I feel like it's a really good review, plus introducing the idea of pencil & paper work (without kiddo having any clue that's what we're doing, LOL). I'm getting a pretty good grasp of where kiddo is at with things, where we might need to do a little more practice with certain skills, and where I may need to step things up to challenge kiddo a bit more!There are so many more of these out there, I feel like we can just carry on with these as long as kiddo is interested. It's a good thing for the two of us to do together, during breaks on a hot day, or as we're winding down at the end of a busy day of play. We do as many pages as kiddo feels like doing, put our stickers on the game board, and feel like we accomplished something!I will say, some of the activities do assume that your kiddo knows certain fairy tales, which my kiddo hasn't been particularly interested in previously. So I've had to scramble to find short versions online to bring kiddo up to speed.I would recommend thumbing through the book ahead of time and gathering books or print-outs of the stories involved, to be sure everyone is familiar with all the stories when they come up in the course of the game. A reading list would be an excellent addition to this book for sure!

I buy these books for my kids every summer and they consistently enjoy them each year. They are pretty accurately leveled to what my kids learned the previous year, and there are sometimes little blurbs with reminder information in case they forget a concept. The maps in the back allow them to earn stickers for almost every page, which helps keep the motivated. As a mom and teacher, I enjoy the supplemental activities ("Outdoor Quests", book recommendations, etc.)