Review: Trail Guide to US Geography from GeoMatters

This year for US geography, my son, age11, is using the Trail Guide to US Geography curriculum from GeoMatters. We're on week six, and so far, we are very happy with the results. Shorty is learning one state per week nstead of cramming two or three states per week as the curriculum recommends. When we get to Florida, our home state, we will spend an extra week or two doing a Florida history and state study lapbook using additional resources as well.

In this way, Shorty will take a little under two years to complete the course, but so far, we're finding that pace really suits him. He is really digging into each state every day and chatters endlessly about all the cool stuff he's learning about America.

The curriculum teaches the same content with questions and activities for three levels: K-3, 4-8 and high school. So you can use the same curriculum for all your kids and do a state study with the whole family, or do it three times with each child and learn totally new information. It also teaches research skills with atlases, dictionaries, almanacs and other sources, and includes map drills, art projects and other hands-on recommendations. It's fairly inexpensive for everything you get and you can use the resources for several years.

Here is a link for their online store.

For this curriculum, you'll need:

- Trail Guide to US Geography - $18.95 - it is $12 on Amazon. This is the spine of the curriculum, with all the daily questions, map drills, and projects and resources listed for each state, plus an 8-week literature-based study on the fifty states at the end.

- Some kind of comprehensive US State atlas - we LOVE the one she recommends, Children's Illustrated Atlas of the 50 states, which is $10. The author explained to me on the Yahoo! group that no atlas she found was 100% amenable to the questions and approach in her book - all the ones she reviewed lacked this feature or that piece of information, because there seems to be no perfect children's state atlas around - but that is okay, because a main goal of the course was to teach the child research skills on a global scale, so that if your child can't find something in the atlas, he knows how to find it elsewhere, or online. I liked that, and so far, I have seen it bear out results.

You'll also need some kind of access to blank maps. We've been really happy with the Uncle Josh book she has for sale - it's usable for world geography, history, and many other purposes as well, very well worth the $20 on the site, available from Amazon and RainbowResource for $12 or so. I think it's probably possible to get blank outline maps of each state for free online, but I like having it all there in one place. I make copies on my printer each week. They have all the maps available on CD-ROM for nearly $30, but we found that a little out of our price range. Your family's mileage may vary, and I think it may be very worthwhile if you have more than one child.

You'll also need a recent almanac, we got the 2009 paper back almanac from Time Life for about $9, but Time for Kids has a kid-friendly one for the younger set for that much, too. Again, these are resources you'll use for years and a main purpose of the curriculum is to teach research skills organically. Of course, there are online almanacs and resources which can take the place of a hard copy almanac, but I am really loving the hands-on approach to teach children research skills. It has definitely been successful in that so far with my kiddo and I'm really happy with it.

Finally, they have an 8-week section at the end on learning geography through literature, so for the US geography course, you'll need a copy of the novel "The Captain's Dog" about the Lewis and Clark adventures. We won't get to that until late next year, and we'll then get ours from the library for free.

There are 2 other recommended resources that are optional from GeoMatters - Geography Through Art, an art project book which can also be used with their world geography curriculum, and Eat Your Way Through the USA, a national recipe book. My son has textural/ food/ OCD issues due to his autism so we skipped the recipes, but he has been enjoying the Geography Through Art book - I put the projects from that book as an art workbox whenever we have it come up :) But the curriculum is quite doable without either of these books.

It cost me under $50 total, and considering it was for over 2 years' worth of in-depth hands-on material I didn't think that was too bad at all! I could probably have cut down on the costs, too, if I had decided to forgo the almanac and the outline maps, yet I don't regret purchasing either of these. I'm just very impressed with the quality of the programs. When Shorty gets done with the US Geography course next year, we'll definitely consider purchasing their Trail Guide to World Geography course for 8th and 9th grade. They have an additional course, Trail Guide to Bible Geography, which is a survey of geography of the ancient world, but that's thinking too far ahead for us!

They have a Yahoo! group, on which the author posts quite actively, in case you have any questions not covered by their course samples and detailed FAQs on their main site: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/GeographyTrailGuides/

They also offer two complete curricula centered around geography that come very highly recommended by many parents I know, Galloping the Globe for world geography, and Cantering the Continent for US geography. Those are a little more expensive initially, but as I understand it, they are complete, geography-centered unit-based curricula designed for multiple years of use, and all you need to do is add math and language arts/phonics. Their Trail Guide series is their stand-alone geography curriculum, which we chose because we already had AmblesideOnline as a main curriculum and because my son doesn't really like unit studies.

I should mention that AmblesideOnline has its own literature-based geography studies, using living books by Holling C. Holling like "Seabird," "Minn of the Mississippi" and "Paddle to the Sea." Unfortunately, for some reason, my son HATES doing geography this way and strongly dislikes all of Holling's books! So we're happy with this more formal, structured, research approach to learning geography.

Bonus points for us: it's turned out to be very workboxable!

We're on the sixth week of our school year this year, and so far, my son enthusiastically cites geography as his favorite subject, and can tell you all kinds of details about the six states he's learned about so far. I think that speaks for itself!

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