This review covers two different books! First up, the storybook:
- short chapter book meant to be read over an entire school year
- traveling in and out of various maps results in hearing many new stories
- convo: magic mentioned
- includes a pronunciation guide for unusual words
Type: illustrated chapter book
Ages: 7-10
Author: Ned Bustard
Illustrators: Ned Bustard, Matthew Clark
The idea for the book is good and clever. Peter Pan appears in the office of Mr. Latitude and Mr. Longitude (see this review) in hopes for new stories. If you’ve read Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie (see that review here), you know Pan likes stories!
However, my children and I found most of the chapters pretty choppy–as if the editors wanted a longer story shortened and it was done rather hastily? Additionally, this little book was spread across a whole school year, so we almost always had to go back and figure out what was happening in the story. At the moment, I can’t think of how that could be improved on, besides making the story book longer and requiring some reading of it between geography lesson days. It’s not all bad, on the other hand, to review what we last read!
Well-read children will enjoy mentions of various people in literature and history, such as Mary Poppins, Dr. Livingstone, Anansi, and King Solomon. They’ll hear reference to the Trojan Horse, the Great Sphinx, and Atlantis.
A great workbook accompanies the above story book. Here are some quick points:
- full of colorful maps & photos that bring geography alive
- activities of a wide variety included
- glossary, answers, and quizzes in the back
All the pages are perforated, which makes it a piece of cake to remove the answer pages at the beginning of the school year. However, the first page of answers is printed on the back side of the last glossary page. They printed the quizzes one-sided, so I suggest in future productions (if anyone in charge ever reads this, ha) the same be done with that page. For a fix, I just photocopied the last glossary page and glued it into the book for each child.
It’s very easy to customize this to fit your family or your classroom. We certainly did not do every single activity in the book! And my children, with different ages, sometimes did different parts of a worksheet than the other. Overall, I was quite impressed with the workbook. It’s attractive and inviting, and we learned a lot from it!
The story book and workbook are published by Veritas Press and are accompanied by geography songs. The songs were great–I can’t believe we all learned where every single African country is! The book+workbook bundle can be used for any grammar school grade, with 2nd grade being the youngest recommended. The songs can be used for any age, of course. Happy geography studies!