Students build confidence and mastery of practical geography skills with consistent, six-page chapters. Each chapter includes two teaching pages, two practice pages, one mixed practice page, and one review page. An atlas in each book offers easy access to important information. Bold-faced geography terms are referenced in the glossary. Geography Themes Up Close introduces students to the five themes of geography: location, place, human environment/interaction, movement,and region.
This workbook-based series uses the five geography themes of movement, place, regions, location, and human/environment interaction to teach geography and social studies skills to students at different grade levels. The different grades have some degree of overlap in the skills practiced, with overlapping areas in the higher grades being investigated in much greater depth. To give an idea of when different skills are taught, the different levels focus on the following:
- Level A pictures, looking at pictures from above, maps from pictures, sides/compass directions on a map, symbols and keys, and globes.
- Level B landforms and water, maps and map keys, directions, globes, continents and oceans, boundaries, and map labels.
- Level C directions and map keys, distance and scale, resource maps, landform maps, route maps, grids, latitude, longitude, and graphs.
- Level D directions and legends, intermediate directions, grids, distance scale, route maps, relief maps, latitude, longitude, and graphs.
- Level E directions, symbols and legends, scale and distance, route maps, physical maps, special purpose maps, grids, latitude, longitude, the earth and sun, time zones, and graphs.
- Level F globes, symbols and directions, scale and distance, route maps, relief and elevation, latitude and longitude, climate maps, combining maps, comparing maps, time zones, projections, and graphs.
The five themes are re-introduced in each book good for review or if you want to pick up in the middle of the series and not start at the beginning. Each section ends with a skill check, or practice test, in preparation for both the midterm and final tests (which are found in the Teacher's Edition). Throughout each chapter, students will answer both simple and thought-provoking questions, fill in the blanks, and do map and graph work. The workbooks are very colorful, and they are attractively laid out with maps or graphs on every page. The workbooks are consumable. The Teacher's Editions are very comprehensive, containing program overviews, scope and sequences, an introduction to the five themes of geography, teaching strategies for each chapter, blackline masters of all the maps and the midterm and final tests, test answers, all the student workbook pages with answers filled in, and eight to ten full-color transparencies of maps and graphs that are used in the grade level. While not essential to have, the Teacher Editions provide a lot of helpful ideas for classroom or co-op use (which can be adapted for home use also). The Teacher's Editions are also in full color.
