Anonymous
Posted January 6, 2005
I recently bought Spectrum workbooks in Language Arts and Writing for grades 1 and 3. I flipped through these books in the store, after having been unsuccessful in finding the workbooks I had originally been looking for, and they seemed to look like they had what I needed. What a tremendous disappointment I experienced when my daughters started working in them! Within two lessons I found out that the publishers had relabeled and repackaged a great deal of information between their Spectrum Language Arts and Spectrum Writing workbooks. They're almost absolute duplicates of one another, right down to activities, assignments, pictures, you name it. The only differences are page numbers and an occasional different graphic. This, in my opinion, is a complete rip-off, and it makes me question a company's ethics who would do this. At almost $9.00 each, which is the current price for these workbooks, I am pretty angry. As an added kick in the teeth, I have already found numerous mistakes in the answer keys for the third grade books. Bottom line: DO NOT buy Spectrum Language Arts and Spectrum Writing workbooks expecting to get two useful workbooks for schooling. Even apart from the duplications, I can't in good conscience recommend these workbooks at all. They are a true disappointment. I would recommend instead the Masters Skills Series of workbooks through American Education Publishing. My daughters really enjoy these workbooks, and they're of a much better quality overall, including content and the way ideas are presented, than the Spectrum books. They're also $2.00 less per book. McGraw Hill has no right to label their Spectrum Language Arts and Writing workbooks as two separate workbooks, with as much as is duplicated between the books in each given grade level. Though I haven't had opportunity to look at any of their other Spectrum books, given this experience I can say that I will never buy anything labeled Spectrum again.
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