Customer Reviews

Mapping The World By Heart Lite

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Our school has been using David Smith's "Mapping the World by Heart" curriculum for three years. My fourth grade class studies US History, and I have adapted the curriculum so that my class maps the United States by heart. Our sixth grade, for their last project before graduation, maps the world by heart. This is truly a wonderful project that challenges even the most gifted students, yet also gives different students a chance to shine in the classroom. Every year students, faculty, and parents come to the final dispay of our maps and exclaim, "There is no way that I could do this!" Imagine the pride that a ten or twelve-year-old feels when they have acquired knowledge that their parents find astounding. Many parents have framed their children's USA and world maps and have put them up in the home as artwork! The curriculum is broken down into mini-lessons and is very easy to follow. Even if you did not want to use the entire curriculum, there are plenty of good geography resources and lessons included. In my opinion, every student in the United States should be required to use this curriculum. It is truly incredible what geography our students know when they leave our school!

I used this curriculum with a homeschool co-op. I taught twelve children ranging from grades 4-12. Our "before" world maps from memory hardly contained any information and very unusual continent shapes and locations, even the one done by grades 9-12.
As we mapped and labeled each continent, we also did a study of the history and culture of the countries in each continent. Every week, each student researched a different area of each culture and gave oral presentations in class.(these ideas/activities are given in the curriculum.) Our end of year maps from memory are the best endorsement I could give. I wish you could see them. The continents were accurately drawn and 70 to 80 percent of the details like landforms, political divisions and capital cities were included. Our best map was completed by a 6th grader who was able to list every single item on the "mapping the world by heart list" given in the curriculum. There is some teacher preparation in doing extra activities recommended in the curriculum. My only complaint was that the map sheets were not available in smaller quantities so we had to come up with our own outline maps to label. I highly recommend that every student be required to complete this curriculum before reaching highschool. My history class no longer has to ask "Where is that?"

The "Mapping the World By Heart" curriculum is a must for any social studies teacher. It has easy-to-follow lesson plans, great projects and games, outline maps, and lots of useful geographical resources. The actual project of mapping a geographical area "by heart" is the best (and most amazing) project that I have ever done with students. Currently, my students IN 2ND GRADE can draw South American maps by memory. To my students' surprise, many of their parents can't even label the countries in South America on a blank outline map! I have also used the "Mapping the World By Heart" curriculum to have students map the USA and Canada by heart. I have also seen 6th grade world memory maps at another school that are TRULY amazing.

Even if you decide not to have your students map the world by heart, the lesson plans and information alone included in the curriculum are worth the cost.

I am very glad to now see that 'Mapping the World by Heart' is now available at Amazon. This wonderful geography program is just great for homeschool kids. Would you believe that at the end of the year your kids could draw a world map from memory? They could if you follow all the lessons in this book! I love the lessons and the way the whole book is put together. David has recently updated the book and I was lucky enough to review it. My kids really love the lessons and look forward to geography twice a week. You get all the maps that you will need for all the lessons, (you will need to copy or order more for all your children). I would even say that all the map drawing and coloring could be counted towards your art credits for the year. There are so many other projects that can stem from this as well...like for social studies fair with a homeschool group or just for grandma! This would be a great curriculum to start as a unit study where you would pause and research areas that you were studying on the map.

First of all, the enclosed video with this product is really more of a promo; it helps very little with using the course.

Secondly, the written material is put together like a menu. The "appetizers" are some fun and easily implementable activities to help kids gain an overview of geographic concepts.

The "desserts" are different ways to output the learned material.

However the "main course" in which I expected to learn HOW to teach my kids to "map the world by heart" was nothing but a list of the continents and all the countries and landforms that need to be memorized. I was looking to this course to teach me HOW to teach my kids to "map the world by heart" but all it showed me was the WHAT. It, unfortunately, was a waste of money.

I bought this program because of rave reviews I had read. The intro video is very impressive, which features the teacher who created the program and his 7th grade class. It will motivate you to teach your student(s) geography.
However, when I started to use the program, it was not complete. It assumes you already have some idea of what you want to teach, and it gives you enrichment ideas to teach in creative ways. I am only starting the program, so I will get back to you when I have used it more. However, I did feel I had to purchase additional materials to teach concepts that were involved in certain introductory exercises in the book.
I think the program might be ideal for school teachers; for home educating parents, they may need supplemental materials to help them out.

Our school has been using David Smith's "Mapping the World by Heart" curriculum for three years. My fourth grade classs studies US History, and I have adapted the curriculum so that my class maps the United States by heart. Our sixth grade, for their last project before graduation, maps the world by heart. This is truly a wonderful project that challenges even the most gifted students, yet also gives different students a chance to shine in the classroom. Every year students, faculty, and parents come to the final display of our maps and exclaim, "There is no way that I could do this!" Imagine the pride that a ten or twelve-year-old feels when they have acquired knowledge that their parents find astounding. Many parents have framed their children's USA and world maps and have put them up in the home as artwork! The curriculum is broken down into mini-lessons and is very easy to follow. Even if you did not want to use the entire curriculum, there are plenty of good geography resources and lessons included. In my opinion, every student in the United States should be required to use this curriculum. It is truly incredible what geography our students know when they leave our school!

I am a 7th grade teacher from Madison Wisconsin. I have used this program for 12 years. I teach about 150 kids each school year and all of them, from the very brightest to the very lowest ability children, learn it in their own right. We practice one continent at a time and learn mnemonic devices to reinforce newly acquired knowledge. For example, the phrase "Cute James Hates Doing Puzzles" represents the Caribbean Islands of Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico in order from west to east. The word "BASMOQN" represents the lower Canadian provinces in order from west to east: British Colombia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland. I show the students how to draw each region and we practice, practice, practice. When I feel they're ready, I test them on each region by asking them to draw it "by heart" on their posters with nothing more available to them than a list of the correct spellings of the names of countries, provinces, and water bodies. The finished product-a big map of the world drawn by each student from memory, is truly breathtaking and every year parents and students who've had older siblings come through my class tell me that they "still have their map". I highly recommend this program.

The program comes with a set of large maps but they are too big for my home printer. I had to pay to make copies. I could have ordered them from the publisher but they come in sets of 30 (or so) of one particular map. It would be good if it was possible to order sets like the sample set.

The maps are very hard to use. We tried to outline and label the counties of Asia and found it almost impossible to locate countries because rivers are included on the maps and they muddle the borders. It's good to learn where the rivers are but not at the expense of learning where the country is.

In one of the lessons a grid is draw on a map and then (to scale) a grid is to be draw on the playground. The students are then to transfer the small map to the large one. We're rural and don't have any place that we could use to re-create this lesson. I'm sure if this was the only problem with mapping the world by heart I would find a solution but it's not.

I wish I had known the extent of extra maps that are needed for this program. Maps are not cheap and some are hard to find. We only have dial up available to us so using the internet is limited.

Although, we don't plan to compete in any geography bees we are using The Geography Bee Complete Preparation Handbook to help guide us in learning geography. I also bought some map software so I can print all the maps we need. It's not perfect but it's much better than Mapping the World by Heart.

A Comment From The Author...

The biggest criticism that seems to appear in the reviews here is that the material doesn't tell people "how to teach their children how to draw the world". This is completely on purpose. Read on.

In my view, the job of the teacher is not to TEACH how to draw the countries and land masses, but to give children lots of opportunity to FIGURE IT OUT FOR THEMSELVES, to TEACH THEMSELVES. And the program is designed to help teachers and homeschoolers to find ways to help children teach themselves, and has worked succcessfully for 20 years.

Also note that the new publisher does not ship a VHS tape, and that the maps and contents are all new since the Summer of 2010.

How to prepare kids to map the world by heart...

I suggest doing nothing at all about learning borders and continents and so on during the school year -- to impose an overlay of "memorization" on all the regional maps creates a constant sense of panic.

Instead, the students teach themselves how to draw the boundaries and borders during the "getting ready" time, in the 3 weeks before they make their final memory maps. They study and memorize the borders, they create their own mnemonics, and they teach them to each other.

Here's the general order of what I do...
1. Run off lots of blank maps in the grid you've decided to use.

2. For each student, run off one filled-in map to be used for checking.
2a. Post one filled in map on each available window in the classroom, so students can hold their hand-made maps on top and check their work.

3. Students practice every night -- start with the point where 0 degrees of longitude meets zero degrees of latitude, and learn the coast of Africa, each night a little more. Africa generally takes a week. But by then, they are already "learning how to learn..."; some students will be very "right-brained", and try to do connect-the-dots and other literal techniques; others will be very "left-brained", and will focus on shapes and general relationships. Most students find a method somewhere in between that works for them.

4. In class each day, hand out a blank map and say "show me what you learned last night". This will give you a good idea of how they are doing.

5. Let students ask questions of each other -- I call them coping questions. They can ask these out loud, or if they think everybody else knows it and they'll embarrass themselves, then they can drop a card in the classroom "suggestion box". For example, you might get "I know the countries in Central America but not the order they are in; how have others learned this...", to which one or more will reply with a mnemonic ("beware of hot gorillas eating nitrates casually, pop" for example); "I can't get the top of Russia to look right...", to which somebody might say "it's a triangle, and here's how I make it..."; "how did you learn the African countries on the Mediterranean, to which somebody says "a MALE from Tunisia..."; etc., etc.

6. Bit by bit, students make sense of it all; during the actual map-making, they can review at home each night for the section they plan to do in class the next day. It really does work.

I hope that helps.

David Smith, author of "Mapping the World By Heart"