World Atlas Book and App
The new Barefoot World Atlas app for iPad looks great! I am excited to get my kids to use it because they have a shaky knowledge of world geography. $7.99.
The app is based on a great book!
Click here to see the book at Amazon.
Click on image to view at iTunes.
The world keeps getting smaller, and despite units in geography in third grade, my fourth grader still can’t conceptualize that Turks and Caicos is an ISLAND and not attached to England. At a school mystery dinner event, our host family had lived in Israel for a few years and had their second (out of four) boys in Jerusalem. This somehow convinced their fourth grader that his brother was an immigrant — they are studying immigration right now — and he is Asian American because Israel is in Asia.
When I visited sixth grade for parents’ visiting day, my daughter’s class was answering, in small groups, questions about political versus geographic boundaries which reminded me of my dentist Dad friend dentist who is Italian by way of Canada. His family is from the part of Italy that is now Croatia by way of Yugoslavia and the Austria-Hungarian empire. At least, I think that is the history. It’s so confusing, I can’t keep up.
And so geography, which seems so neat, tidy, and rather dry, is actually a melodrama of cloak and dagger wars, dictators and underground rebellions, and constantly shifting borders. The place to start to make this subject engaging and bite-sized, is a book like World Atlas by Barefoot Books. It gives the big picture starting with oceans and continents and then breaks out with factoid paragraphs on physical features, brief history, climate & weather, and the physical environment but it’s the gorgeous color illustrations and Lift-the-Flaps that will draw young readers in.
It’s good for me too. After not paying attention to politics for the past two decades, I have a lot of catching up to do!
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Amazon / Signed or Inscribed by Me
Food for the Future: Sustainable Farms Around the World
- Junior Library Guild Gold selection
- Massachusetts Book Award Long List
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- Starred review from School Library Journal
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Amazon / Barefoot Books / Signed or Inscribed by Me
Amazon / Scholastic / Signed or Inscribed by Me
Cool! I bet my daughter would love that (and I could learn something too)! Also, We are big fans of Barefoot Books!!!
To Ann,
I know that I could use a refersher course on World atlas! I tried to help my 6th grader study for her Eastern Europe geography test and there were so many NEW countries that I had never heard of! Hertzgovenia? Ugh! The world is changing too fast for me to keep up!