Star Wars Workbooks help with the Force, 3 R’s and more

A couple years ago we started a summer project with our 2 year old called the summer book. It was a way to engage him in activity books that would help him learn letters, colors and vocabulary. It’s three years later and he still loves his summer books, but they’ve graduated to a year-round activity.  Because of that we’ve seen a variety of summer books, some that were fun and some that were not. We were sent a couple of the Star Wars Workbooks for him to do and they are fun, educational and have really cool pictures for everyone to look at.

The Star Wars Workbooks are available for preschool to second graders. The younger set has an extra book of skills for Preschool Shapes, Colors and Patterns plus one for Kindergarten Phonics and ABCs. For the older kids it’s straight up math, reading and writing.

Prior to working with the books he was vaguely familiar with Star Wars. He had seen Star Wars Rebels, but hadn’t seen, or to my knowledge even knew of the films. The films are how he judges if something is popular. When he realized that Curious George had a film he was over the moon. He has since asked that about all of this childhood viewing shows. I told him that there was a Star Wars film and he’s ready to see it, although realistically one year away from watching it.

The workbooks are fun to look at and there is a clear difference in the approach to each grade. The Kindergarten Math Skills book is geared to kids 5-6 years old. It works on basic counting and subtraction skills, writing numbers, identifying tie fighters and more. Depending on the skill set of your child the book could be too simple, but for us it’s just right and really gets him motivated to learn.

It’s a book that he wants to do. What’s more the difference between his previous book and Star Wars Workbooks has shown that his handwriting is getting better. In the previous book he had lots of difficulty controlling how big his numbers and letters were with his handwriting. Now he’s getting his letters and numbers (almost) to scale to where they fit inside the lines.

When we do the 1rst Grade Reading book with him it’s slightly different. He can do some sight words, but can’t quite comprehend enough to read a complete sentence. If the sentence is asking for a word to be filled in the blank he’ll just ask for our help to read the sentence, then he’ll plug in the words that are provided for the kids to choose from.  This book also works on blend sounds like ‘sl’, ‘sk’ or so on, asking readers to write down the sounds to the corresponding words.

Bottom line: we were surprised at the quality of these books and how much our kids wanted to successfully complete them.  Our oldest has gotten better with basic math, can do more sight words and genuinely looks forward to doing a page or two each night. Each book retails for $8.95, but if you visit Costco they sell them in multi-packs and some independent books stores will discount the books if you purchase multiples.  The books are aligned with National Common Core standards too.