This is day 4 of my kids being back in school, and while they haven’t yet brought home any homework, they have certainly been doing homework exercises with mommy each afternoon. And you may be surprised to hear that they enjoy it!

Workbooks, just like regular books, come in a wide variety of qualities, and getting a bad workbook can equal miserable kids and parents and not much actual learning taking place. But if you find a good one, then you just just may find that your kids ask to get to do some homework every single day (yes, even on weekends, and yes, my kids really do ask!).

Over the summer I tend to use a larger quantity of workbooks and some of them are a bit more rigorous. During the school year I’m aware that my kids have already been in school for 4-7 hours, and so I back off on the intensity and tend to offer workbooks that are colorful and that feel like fun mini-challenges instead of something dry and tedious.

So far, the workbooks sent to us by School Zone Publishing have fit the bill perfectly for weeknight enrichment.

Let me show you a page from one of the books so you can get a sense for what to look for in a school year enrichment workbook:

The pages are bright to draw in the child, there are fun graphics, and in this example, there are actually several different subjects that get touched on, all on one worksheet. So these are just fun ways to do tiny little tests on your child’s retention of the things they should be learning in school. It’s empowering to them when they get the answers right, and when they are struggling with a concept, they aren’t overwhelmed with dozens of other questions on the same subject to have to wrestle with that day. When they know there’s just one question to work through, it seems manageable.

Are you using workbooks during the school year or is your child saddled down with too much homework, as is? Ever tried School Zone workbooks?