Including Geography in Your Homeschool: A Review of Skill Sharpeners Geography - Grade 2

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There are several subjects that sometimes get pushed to the side when planning homeschool lessons. Electives like music and art, along with studies that are more like sub-subjects (word?) such as spelling and geography. These subjects may be skipped or shortchanged. With Evan-Moor's Skill Sharpeners Geography - Grade 2, you can easily incorporate educational, interesting, and fun geography lessons. Including geography in your homeschool has never been easier!

Timberdoodle includes Skill Sharpeners Geography – Grade 2 in their second-grade curriculum kits. We were lucky enough to receive both the second-grade and the fifth-grade books to review and use in our homeschool. Our daughter has been using the second-grade workbook for several months as part of her normal homeschool lessons, and it has been very useful.

About the Book 

Skill Sharpeners Geography – Grade 2 is a 144-page consumable paperback book. The pages are perforated, so you could pull them out to work on specific pages. And some of the pages are meant to be pulled out, so you can use those with the hands-on activity at the end of the lessons. Including geography in your homeschool with this workbook is easy, as the units include a lot of different topics and ideas. 

There are six units that include: 

• The World in Spatial Terms 
• Places and Regions 
• Physical Systems 
• Human Systems
• Environment and Safety 
• The Use of Geography 

Each lesson with the unit has a specific concept and skills that will help your child learn about the world around them. The lessons include: 

• reading selections
• vocabulary and vocabulary activities 
• visual literacy 
• what I learned from activities 
• hands-on activities 

A Look at a Lesson 

In the "A World Map" lesson, our daughter learned about continents and oceans. She is now able to define the ocean, world, and continent, as well as interpret a map of the oceans. Her hands-on activity had her cutting out the continents and properly gluing them on the map. 

My Thoughts 

I enjoyed using Skill Sharpeners Geography – Grade 2 to include geography in our homeschool lessons. The fact that each lesson included a hands-on activity was great! Because our daughter was finishing up second grade when we started the book, I could easily assign lessons to her, and she would work on those independently. Sometimes, she did have questions, and they were easily answered. I didn't even need to refer to the answer key at the back of the book. 

While some workbooks are geared more toward school than homeschool, I didn't find any activities or questions that we needed to adapt as homeschoolers (although we haven't finished every lesson yet). Questions were about the state or neighborhood and not the school or classroom. 

The pages are very colorful. All the graphics are colorful clipart or photographs. This makes it easier to identify what each image is of when completing exercises. Sometimes, workbooks are only in black-and-white, which makes assignments difficult to complete. 

While the lessons do build on each other, you could do them out of order to accompany your history or social studies lessons with a few modifications. For example, you could include the reading for "A Product Map of Kansas" with lessons on the state of Kansas or "An Ocean Habitat" when studying coastal states or islands.

Our daughter enjoyed this workbook so much that she would complete extra pages after dinner. She asked me on more than one occasion, "How many more pages can I do?" What parent doesn't love it when their child willingly and excitedly completes homeschool assignments? 

Skill Sharpeners Geography – Grade 2 is perfect for ages 7-9. You could easily use it with an older first grader or a younger third grader. I would recommend second grade for use in your homeschool. This was a perfect way to help us include geography in our homeschool. 

I'll be sharing my review of the fifth-grade book soon! 

If you are interested in more from Timberdoodle, please check out my posts about other products here: 

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