A Review of The Trail Guide to U.S. Geography

If your homeschooled child loves maps, state trivia and geography, or it's important to you that your kids learn all 50 states, their capitals and basic history, The Trail Guide to US Geography from GeoMatters is designed just for your home school. The curriculum provides everything necessary for a thorough overview of each of the fifty states in an engaging, multi-level, multidisciplinary method. Here's what you'll find in The Trail Guide to U.S. Geography homeschool geography curriculum.

The book presents content with questions and activities for three levels: K-3, 4-8 and high school. You can use the same book for all your kids and do a state study with the whole family, or you can choose to do it three times with each child and learn totally new information with each cycle. It's quite broad and flexible in its scope. The book teaches careful research skills with atlases, dictionaries, almanacs and other sources, and includes map fun, art projects and other hands-on recommendations. It's fairly inexpensive for everything you get, particularly considering you can use the resources for several years.

Your homeschool can use the book, The Trail Guides to U.S. Geography, by itself, but to get a richer learning experience from the curriculum, you'll need several additional resources that the authors recommend.

You'll need the book itself. This is the primary and essential spine of the curriculum, with all the daily questions, map projects, and art projects and resources listed for each state, plus an 8-week literature-based study on the fifty states at the end based on the historical fiction novel, The Captain's Dog by Roland Smith. Your child may not be interested in that, and the literature-based study is a rather abrupt departure from the previous lessons. If you choose not to do the literature study, the core curriculum is robust and complete without it. Simply spread out the other lessons among your homeschool's school days, or take it at your own pace.

Students will definitely benefit from some kind of well-written United States State atlas. The one the author recommends, Children's Illustrated Atlas of the 50 States, is colorful, concise and engaging for elementary and junior high kids. Older children may benefit from a more sophisticated atlas, or reading up on the state on Wikipedia.

Your child will not be able to answer every question in the book using this resource. It is not comprehensive; in fact, there exists no real comprehensive state atlas for kids under the age of 13. The author explained to me via email correspondence that no atlas she had 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 - but that is okay, because a main goal of the course is to teach the child research skills on a global scale. If your child can't find something in the atlas, he will learn, with this course, how to find it elsewhere, or online. The parents I've talked to, who have used this curriculum, have seen this bear out with their own children.

You will need access to hard copies of blank maps. The author recommend Uncle Josh's Outline Map Book by George and Hannah Wiggers. It's usable for world geography, history, and many other purposes as well, very well worth the price on the site. It's probably possible to print blank outline maps of each state for free online, but you may like having them all there in one place. You can make copies on your printer/scanner each week, or take it to a copy place and have them copy all the maps you'll need all at once. They have all the maps available on CD-ROM, but it is quite a lot more expensive. Your family's mileage may vary, and I think it may still be very worthwhile if you have more than one child.

A recent almanac is a must. The paperback almanac available from Time Life is good for teens and pre-teens who are comfortable looking things up in a dictionary. For the younger set, Time for Kids has a kid-friendly one for about the same price. Most of these are resources you'll use for years, as a main goal 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 if you're looking to keep costs low, but the do-it-yourself approach to learning research skills taught by this curriculum is impressively thorough.

At the end of the course, once your child finishes the lessons on all 50 states, there is an 8-week section on learning geography through literature. If you want to do that with your kids, you'll need a copy of the novel used in the literature study. The novel is The Captain's Dog, and it's about the Lewis and Clark adventures told from the point of view of their pet dog. I feel that this is optional, at best, if not wholly extraneous. If your child isn't one to easily change course in a radical way about the same subject out of the blue, I would skip it. However, for kids who love historical fiction or stories about animals, it could be a really fun add-on.

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. Many children, especially young ones, don't enjoy sampling unknown cuisine, so I think most homeschooling families would never miss this last resource if it were omitted. The projects in Geography Through Art are mixed media and for the most part unique and interesting, but the authors intend them to just be fun extras. For the most part, they only tie in to the geography lessons in tangential ways, and they certainly aren't art lessons. There are few guidelines for the parent to execute the project; you must largely wing it. If your child doesn't like hands-on arts and crafts, or you're short on time or finances, you can easily do without this one, too.

As of this writing, the entire set costs under $50 total, including the main book, the state atlas, the outline map book and the almanac. Considering that covers several years' worth of in-depth, hands-on, interdisciplinary material, it's quite a value. You could probably cut down on the costs if you decide to forgo the almanac and the outline maps, yet I don't think most families will regret purchasing either of these. The quality, breadth and depth of the materials are impressive, and best of all, if their approach works for your family, the same authors have a Bible Geography and World Geography course using the same methods. This curriculum vendor has a passion for life-long geography learning, and I have no doubt your kids will find it contagious.