I am a big believer that you need to practice Maths. And I am also a big believer that it helps to give the kids a wide range of different questions so I am often on the lockout for practice workbooks – books with questions that the kids can work through and questions that may be slightly different.

About a month ago I was looking for more Geometry and Statistics examples for KS2 ages. And this workbook popped up Bond SATs Skills: Maths Workbook: Measurement, Geometry & Statistics 10-11+ Years Core and Stretch. We have used Bond workbooks before and I actually really love the Arithmetic Bond series (I have used it with both of my kids because I just like the format and I think the questions are good) so I immediately asked the PR person at Oxford University Press if I could get a review copy. And they kindly sent us one.

And before anyone says but what about the fact that they are labelled “SAT skills” and home educated kids don’t write SAT’s (and mine have not / are not going to write SAT’s), ignore that wording and just page through some of the Bond workbooks and you are going to find pages of good practice questions. I often use resources that are labelled SAT’s Skills or Test and we just ignore the wording and do the activities on the page as a normal practice examples.

First off most Bond workbooks cover a few years but with this workbook there is just one Measurement, Geometry and Statistics workbook and it is classed as being for ages 10-11+. But with home education we don’t always stick strictly to the curriculum in terms of what we cover when and straight away I could tell that my son would be able to work through the Geometry questions and the Stats questions but not yet all the measurement questions. Which does not bother me as I always dip in and out of workbooks and use the pages as we cover the sections (so we will leave some of the measurement questions and come back to those once we have covered it in more detail).

The book is split into 10 units. At the start of each unit there is a brief reminder of important facts – they call this Helpful Hints. Now I want to stress this brief reminder is not going to take the place of you explaining the concepts to the kids. This is a reminder of some facts assuming that you have already worked through the section. After the helpful hints there are normally 3, sometimes 4 pages of questions on that topic (and yes the answers are in the book). The questions are also a mix of straight forward calculations and some story sums / problem sums.

So the 10 units are split as follows

• Geometry – Properties of 2D and 3D shapes
• Geometry – 2D and 3D shapes including nets
• Geometry – Angle properties
• Geometry – Properties of a circle
• Measurement – metric and imperial units
• Measurement – area and perimeter (rectangle, triangle and parallelogram)
• Measurement – volume of cuboids
• Measurement – problems involving conversion
• Geometry – translations and reflections in all four quadrants
• Statistics (pie charts and line graphs)

A good selection of topics although my one criticism would be that I would have liked more stats included. But then you get 46 pages of Maths question (some of which are going to challenge the kids), plus the answers for £4.99 which I do think is a good price.

I think it is a useful workbook with a good selection of questions and one which I actually would have liked to use with my oldest.

You can buy the Bond books directly from the OUP website, at your local bookstore (I have seen them at both WH Smith and Waterstones) or from Amazon – Bond SATs Skills: Maths Workbook: Measurement, Geometry & Statistics 10-11+ Years Core and Stretch

Admin Bit – Like I mentioned above we were given a review copy of this book but all opinions expressed are mine (and my kids).

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