Getting Your Hands on Old Instructional Fair Materials
Instructional Fair Inc was a publisher of educational worksheets and teaching aids back in the nineties. They had a broad catalog covering math, science, reading, and social studies for elementary through middle school. The 1990 era output is what most people are hunting for now, mostly because those books were cheap, widely distributed through school book fairs, and have held up reasonably well as practice material. The problem is that the answer keys are either missing from used copies or scattered across outdated PDFs on random websites. Start with the actual book. Flip to the back. A lot of their titles from 1989 to 1994 included a dedicated answers section in the last ten to fifteen pages. Titles like "Math Practice Workbook," "Reading Skill Builders," and "Science Experiments for Kids" all had them. If you have a used copy, check for a separate teacher's edition booklet that sometimes got bound in separately. Those had detailed answer keys plus teaching notes. For digital sources, the Internet Archive is your best bet. Search by ISBN. I've found complete teacher editions for about sixty percent of the titles published between 1988 and 1993. Upload dates are inconsistent but the scans are generally readable. Archive.org often has the full book with answers intact rather than just the student workbook pages.
The second reliable source is teacher resource sites like TeachersPayTeachers. A lot of educators have reuploaded scanned answer keys for individual titles. The search is messy though. You need the exact title and ISBN number. Searching for just "Instructional Fair 1990 math answers" gives you a lot of broken links and low-quality PDFs with missing pages. I ran into a specific issue last year when trying to track down the answer key for the 1991 "Geometry Basics" workbook. The ISBN listed on Amazon pointed to a student edition with no answers. The teacher edition had a different ISBN that wasn't indexed in any library catalog I could access. What I ended up doing was searching WorldCat for library holdings of that ISBN, finding three public libraries that owned it, and requesting a scan through their interlibrary loan system. It took about two weeks and I got a clear PDF of the last twenty pages with all the answers and explanations. It was faster than my first attempt, which involved digging through four different seller listings on eBay and getting burned by two books that only had the front half. Another thing to watch out for: some titles were revised in the mid-nineties and the answer keys changed. Page numbers shifted, questions were reordered, and a few answers were corrected. If you're using a 1994 key with a 1990 edition, cross-reference at least ten questions first. I once spent an afternoon thinking I had the wrong book because the answers for chapter three didn't match, and it turned out the 1993 revision had moved half the problems to new chapters.
How to Use These Materials Effectively
These workbooks are straightforward drill-and-practice style. They aren't pedagogically deep. The value is in the repetition and the fact that the problems are cleanly structured, which makes them useful for targeted practice. If a kid needs extra fraction worksheets or basic geometry vocabulary drills, the Instructional Fair books from this era are adequate. Don't expect innovative problem-solving or conceptual depth. They're workbooks, not curriculum. When you're using the answer keys, the practical approach is to work one section at a time, grade it immediately, and only move forward on sections where the error rate is below twenty percent. Anything higher means the concept isn't sticking and more practice is needed. I found that tracking error rates by topic gives you a clearer picture of what's actually being learned than looking at a total score. The main limitation of these materials is that they reflect the educational standards and question styles of the late eighties and early nineties. Some of the terminology is dated. A few science questions reference models of the atom or classification systems that have been updated. If you're using these for current standardized test prep, the math and reading skills transfer fine, but the science and social studies content may need supplemental verification. It's a thirty-minute job to compare the science answers against a current textbook or a reputable online resource.
Get the Full Details
There's also the physical condition problem. These books were mass-produced on thin paper with cheap binding. Copies found in thrift stores and online marketplaces often have torn pages, especially around the answer sections where students and teachers have been tearing them out. Factor in that when budgeting your time for scanning or transcribing. If you're looking for a more comprehensive modern alternative, school district resource hubs and state education department websites have moved a lot of their older curricula online with current answer keys attached. It won't feel as nostalgic, but the content will be updated and the answers will be accurate to current standards. For quick drill practice though, the original Instructional Fair books still do the job.
