Tuesday, July 8, 2014

K is for... Knowledge Quest



I love geography and I think it's very important to include it in our homeschool. When we study a culture or country, it's obvious that we need to have some sense of where to find it on a map. When we study history, it's very helpful to look at maps and know something about the geography of an area to help us understand how those events unfolded. But finding good maps to use in our homeschool was a bit of a challenge when we started out. A number of years ago, I found Knowledge Quest and purchased their set of Blackline Maps of World History and that made it easy to find the right maps for studying history. Then it got even better a couple of years ago when we got to review Map Trek through the Schoolhouse Review Crew . Map Trek took those historical maps to a whole new dimension! I fell in love with this gorgeous book, which came with a CD-ROM of all the maps in easy-to-print pdf files. The book is a combination of atlas and historical maps, and lesson plans thrown in for good measure. For each map, there is a set of instructions to guide the student in labeling, coloring, and doing research; and there are two or three levels of difficulty, depending on the grade level - or really, on how much time you need to spend with a particular map.

MapTrek hardcover & cd
I love that the maps are presented in chronological order, from ancient civilizations right up to modern times. We have used these maps with all kinds of studies and curriculum, and I have pretty much always been able to find the kind of map I needed, no matter what era or area of the world we were studying.

This coming year, Landon will be working through Exploring World History from Notgrass, so we will get to try out another feature Knowledge Quest offers -  Curriculum Integration Guides to make it even easier to use Map Trek alongside any of several different history curricula.

Knowledge Quest has many other wonderful geography resources, as well as timelines, and some books as well. One I purchased a couple of years ago that was a valuable addition to our library was O Canada! by Karla Akins.


This post is linked at Blogging through the Alphabet, hosted by Ben And Me.
Ben and Me



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1 comments:

Tess said...

Oh I love Map Trek! I have the digital that we reviewed but then I won a copy of the beautiful hardback book with he CD so I can print out student pages. Oh my! What a great topic for the letter K.

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