How One Curriculum Workbook Helped My Struggling Fifth Grader Catch Up

I am going to be honest with you the way I would be if we were sitting at my kitchen table right now. By the end of fourth grade, my son Marcus was testing at a second-grade reading level and struggling to keep up in math. His teacher was lovely and genuinely concerned. We had tried tutoring apps, reading programs, extra homework sessions after dinner. None of it stuck. Marcus was getting more anxious about school, and I was getting more desperate. I am a fifth-grade teacher myself, which made the whole thing feel extra personal, because I could see exactly where the gaps were and I still could not close them. What finally turned that around, over one summer, was working through the Carson Dellosa Comprehensive Curriculum of Basic Skills together.

The first week of June, I sat down at that same kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a yellow legal pad. I made a list of everything we had tried and why each one had fizzled. The apps were too fragmented. The tutoring workbooks we bought at a local teacher-supply store covered only one subject at a time, so we were juggling five different books and still missing the big picture. What Marcus needed was something that felt like a real school day in a single, manageable package, something that covered all the subjects together so the connections between reading and writing and math actually showed up on the same page.

A colleague of mine had used the Carson Dellosa Comprehensive Curriculum of Basic Skills workbook with her own daughter the previous summer. She mentioned it almost as an aside while we were talking after the last staff meeting in May. She said it was dense, it was thorough, and her daughter had gone from feeling defeated to feeling like herself again by August. I trusted her judgment because I had watched her run a classroom for nine years. I ordered the fifth-grade edition that evening.

It arrived two days later. I flipped through it before I showed Marcus, the way I preview materials before I introduce them to students. I was impressed and a little relieved. The Carson Dellosa workbook covers reading comprehension, writing, grammar, fractions, geometry, and more, all inside one spiral-bound book. The pages are clean without being sparse. The difficulty moves gradually within each section. It is not trying to be flashy or gamified. It is just solid, well-sequenced content at the right grade level.

By mid-July, Marcus was doing his workbook pages without me having to remind him. That had never happened before with any school material we tried.

We started with 30 minutes a day, every morning before the house got loud. Marcus and I would sit together at the kitchen table, me with my coffee, him with a glass of orange juice and the workbook. I did not sit over his shoulder. I would start him on a page and then do my own work nearby so he knew I was there but he was not performing for me. That distance mattered. After the second week, he started setting his own timer.

The reading comprehension sections were where the biggest shift happened. The passages in the workbook are short enough that Marcus did not feel buried before he started, but they required real inferencing and summarizing. I would check his answers when he finished and we would talk through the ones he missed, not as a correction, just as a conversation. By week four, he was asking me questions about the passages on his own. That was new.

By August, Marcus tested nearly a full grade level higher in reading. His math was not fully caught up, but his fractions work had improved enough that his incoming sixth-grade teacher, when I emailed her a heads-up in late August, told me he was going to be just fine. That was the sentence I had been waiting to hear for over a year.

There are a few things I want you to know if your child is in a similar place. First, the deficit itself is not the most damaging thing. The story a child tells himself about the deficit is the most damaging thing. Marcus had started to believe he was just not a school person. Getting through a page, then a section, then a full unit, and seeing it completed in ink on paper, that rebuilt something in him that no app could touch. Second, a workbook this comprehensive at this price point is genuinely rare. We spent far more on other interventions that gave us far less.

I also want to be straight with you about what it is not. It is not a replacement for a teacher or a tutor if your child has a specific learning difference that needs specialist support. It is not a quick fix for a child who is severely behind and resistant to sitting with paper and pencil. And it does require a parent to be involved at the start, especially for kids who have been struggling and are already braced for failure. You have to sit with them the first few sessions and make it feel ordinary, not remedial.

What I Would Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I have now used this workbook with three of my own students on top of Marcus, quietly slipping copies to parents in the fall parent-teacher conferences when I could see they needed something concrete to take home. Every single time, the parents came back with some version of the same update: it is actually working, and my kid is doing it without a fight. That is not magic. That is good curriculum design doing its job.

If your child finished a school year behind and you are staring down a summer wondering what to do about it, I would start here. One book, one morning routine, one subject at a time. It is not complicated, and that is exactly the point. For more on how to build a full homeschool day around a workbook like this, read our guide to full-year use of the Carson Dellosa Curriculum Workbook, and if you want to know the research behind why printed workbooks outperform apps for catching kids up, take a look at our piece on 10 reasons curriculum workbooks are the backbone of a successful homeschool day.