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Review: Skill Sharpeners Geography - Grade 2

While our history textbook does have geography it is really only over the geography of the time and there is not a lot of it. So to compensate for this we use Skill Sharpeners Geography. I would not use this as your sole history curriculum but rather to supplement like we do. There are 16 different sections for your child to complete. Each one has passages to read, questions to answer and a hands-on activity to do at the end of the section. As to be expected there is a ton of map work for your kids to work on and there are a couple non map sections like suburbs vs city and ocean habitat. The kind of work that will be asked of your child are filling in the blanks (with and without a word bank), multiple choice and writing the answer. I will say that I wish some of the lines were longer because some answers will take a lot more space to write than what is provided for them. So for this we write the answers on a separate piece of paper and then I staple it to the workbook pages. This workbook is also US based so unless you are learning about the US or live in the US I would get another curriculum. 


I like that the booklet is in color and the pictures are nicely drawn so it is more fun for kids to complete. There is also not a whole lot of work to do on each page so when we do this workbook we complete it fairly quickly. Our daughters favorite part are the activities at the end. Up until now all of the hands-on work has been cutting and pasting or coloring things. However, there is one activity in the Grade 2 booklet and you will need a foam ball and paint to make a globe! It is by far the coolest activity in the book to do. The map sections will go over how to read the kind of map they are being show, the different parts of the map, how to use the map and map key. 



It goes more in-depth than the map work that was in Skill Sharpeners Geography grade 1. I think that it is pretty spot on with the grade level that it is intended for. I got ours with our custom Timberdoodle 2nd grade kit. I really like this workbook for working on geography since it is very kid friendly and our daughter finds it to be quite fun. I think when she is having fun with the assignments she is learning better. I do recommend this workbook since is does go over quite a bit and our daughter has learn quite a lot from it. It being colorful and not having to much work on a single page a huge plus especially since history is not often a class that young children are very interested in. What do you use for geography? Is your history an all-in-one curriculum or do you piece it together kind of like how we have done? Let us know in the comment section below.


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