Read of the Week

New All-In-One Spelling Made Fun

Mart Meij

Best Books

Review: Lauren O’Connor-May

My children had a lot of fun with these books, and that in itself is a good review because they were doing schoolwork after all. The author is a retired foundation phase teacher and lecturer from Pretoria and is considered an early childhood development expert. She has compiled and co-authored dozens of education resources and workbooks across several curricula and decades.

These books appear to be CAPS curriculum updates of her earlier material and are also available in Afrikaans.

Earlier versions of the series also included mathematics workbooks but according to the publisher, these have not been released yet.

The books are highly interactive and use a lot of pictures, games and, oddly, clapping to teach children basic spelling principles.

While some of the worksheets can be worked on independently, most of them need coaching and interaction from an adult supervisor.

There is also a lot of cutting, structuring and planning involved, and since I’m reviewing this book as a parent and not a teacher, I can say that this is very time-consuming.

This is not the kind of workbook that’s designed to keep children occupied while they work alone.

The books are R100 each, which I thought was a bit pricey considering their slimness but the consolation is that there are a lot of the cut-out games, flash cards and resources which can be reused, once they’ve been laminated, covered with sturdy contact paper or – as my daughter’s Grade R teacher recommended – put inside a plastic sleeve. In this way even pages that have to be written on can become a reusable, wipe-off resource.