The Big Fat Middle School English Language Arts Workbook: 100+ ELA Practice Exercises (Big Fat Notebooks)

Great ELA giant workbook for elementary - middle school students!

This series is an excellent complementary curriculum or excellent for review work. It’s very structured, filled with good info, skipping the filler. And each lesson has a quiz following. And you can’t beat the cost.

Great layout. Easy to understand. Great adjunct to classroom curriculum.

Looking through it, it's a great book with a lot of excellent exercises that would help anyone improve their language and grammar skills, especially the struggling middle school student.

The book has an answer key in the back to check answers. The lessons are very easy to follow and provide all the information to complete the activities.

I used to book to refresh my English skills. This book take you back to your school days. Highly recommended! All I can say to you ‘Get You One’.

I'll start out by saying the printing is lovely. There are full-color pages that aren't just pretty, they use the colors to help highlight different points. The font they use is also a friendly, handwriting-type font. It might be a bit confusing for older people, but they did a nice job of making it appealing to young people.The grammar and language sections are overall pretty well done, covering subjects like active and passive voice, affixes and roots, types of verbs, etc.My first indication that there was something a little off was when I saw that "ze/zir" were listed as subjective and objective pronouns. Honestly, I wouldn't have minded if they had a special section on these kinds of neopronouns and why they're being used by some people, but to boldly present them as no different than pronouns like "he/she/they" didn't feel quite right.The other section I really felt uncomfortable with was the one on "media literacy". Don't get me wrong; they didn't blatantly push a particularly political viewpoint and examples they give are fairly innocuous. But one of the questions gave me pause:Which of the following is an example of biased language?A. Everyone should exercise regularly for good healthB. Some people believe exercising is beneficial, while others don'tC. Exercising is a waste of time and doesn't make a differenceTheir answer was "C". But "A" also comes from a particular "bias" as well—it may be a "good" one that most people agree with, but it's still bias.The problem I have with this whole section is that it focuses more on identifying "false information" and "not being tricked" rather than true critical thinking, i.e., different sides of a story, finding the valid points in each—and even being able to debate for the sides they disagree with. Ironically, there is a danger in the way this section is written that teachers and parents using it will end up just teaching their own biases to children: viewing any media they don't agree with as "fake" and "manipulative" and teaching them to discard it. This somehow feels contrary to classical liberalism, free speech, and the free press that America was founded on.While the vast majority of examples throughout the book are innocuous, I did see references such as Greta Thunberg's speech and the book "The Hate U Give". To be honest, I didn't mind it myself, but I know some people who might be uncomfortable with references like these being used. Elsewhere in the book they do use non-controversial references like Steinbeck, Asimov, or Harper Lee, so I just wished they could have stuck with those.Overall, a nice book that's perhaps a sign of the times. I do wish that we could go back to a time when we just taught language arts as language arts.

I use this for my grandsons whom I homeschool. He is in 6th grade. Easy and fun to read.