Timberdoodle
Daily Geography Practice published by Evan-Morr for Grade 5.
This reproducible daily practice book contains 36 weekly sections to get your students up to National Geography standards. Each section begins with a page describing the lesson for the week. Each week is on a different topic. For example, week one is about parts of a map. The first page tells the teacher what the student will be learning and how to present it, also what additional resources(map, globe) to use to teach the lesson. There is a vocabulary section right on the page which makes it easy to explain the new words each day they are used in the lesson. The answer key is on the teachers page so you have everything you need for the whole week on one page. There are 3 pages to copy and hand out to the students. In lesson one the handouts are a map of the U.S. and two pages of questions for days M-F. Each day the student answers two questions with an extra challenge on Friday. The first week's challenge is to find the great lakes on a map. this book also contains 36 transparencies of the handouts to use as you teach the lesson.
I used this book with my 3rd and 5th grade students. It was easy to implement without any teacher prep. I just opened the book to the lesson, showed my students the page as I explained what they were looking at and then went over the vocabulary. After we talked about the new skills for each week I asked them Monday's questions and let them answer aloud. Then each day of the week after that I would ask them the new questions and explain anything they didn't understand. This takes us about 5 minutes per day to use and my students enjoy it. My children object to worksheets but I had no problem converting the lessons to oral work. I will print out the maps when they need to label or draw in details. You could come up with different ways to reinforce each lesson by using the map beyond what is listed in the book.
I think this is a quick and easy way to get some geography into your school week with a minimal time investment.
Beginning Geography published by Evan-Moor for grades K-2.
This book contains 93 reproducible activity pages and 2 student friendly, colored wall maps. 3 review pages are included to be used as a review or quiz to assess what the students have learned. Beginning Geography starts out with the basics such as "What is a map" and ends with a section on the different continents, including their locations and the animals that live there. Each activity page is interesting and they are completed by coloring, cut and past, filling in the blanks, drawing, or circling the answer.
My daughter Sarah, a first grade student, helped me review this book. I made a copy of each page for her to work on. She is a good reader and was able to do each page on her own after I presented any new concepts. She enjoyed her work and actually asked to do a second page most days. Sometimes she didn't want to do the page exactly as directed so after I asked her the answers I let her customize the worksheet. My five year old did a few of the first worksheets before giving up. His is not writing words yet and some of the concepts are above his comprehension so we will wait a year or two and try again.
I think this is a great intro book for geography study. The only teacher prep needed is to copy the pages and hand one out each day.
I appreciate the variety of ways the topics are handled. My daughter liked coloring and cutting and gluing in order to complete each page. The worksheets are easy to customize to your student's learning style.
I received free copies of these books from Timberdoodle in order to write this review which is my honest opinion.
