Review: Brookdale House

For this review, we were given an ebook of the Drawing Around the World: Europe book by Brookdale House. Since 2006, Brookdale House has provided homeschoolers and schools with many educational resources that engage children, making learning exciting. Taking a Charlotte Manson approach to learning, Drawing Around the World: Europe is the first book of the Geography Drawing Series, another one currently available is for the USA. This series is planned to help children help children understand where countries are in the world combining art and geography.

For $22.95 (ebook) or $25.95 (printed version), this product is a simple, but effective way to encourage children to learn the geography of the world. We choose Europe as our boys are really interested in this area of the world at the moment. With the ebook you will need internet to download the book and a printer and paper to print it out.

How did we go?

Armed with some books which we borrowed from the library, as well as the Ipad, the boys were ready to Draw Around Europe. I printed a copy for each of the boys, as there is a lot of tracing and drawing which they need to do on their own.

Included in the ebook is a weekly schedule, though each page has the day and week at the top of it to let you know what you are to complete (eg. Week 1, Day 1) as well as additional memorisation techniques and drawing directions.

Day 1 is when you start a new country or countries and this is the day we spent reading our books or searching online different facts about this country before completing the fact sheet and locating and tracing the outline of the country. Though the information need is not given by the publishers, they do provide a list of websites, where you can find it. The rest of the week is followed by locating and trying the map before completing it all my memory on the last day. For days 3 and 4, you are provided with information on how to incorporate timed drills if you wish.

As our boys were interested in learning about each of the countries, we didn’t do any timed drills. We incorporated lots of research instead, reading and searching online for lots of fun and interesting facts about the countries.

Though the drawing of each country only took a few minutes each day, with the research our boys were doing, they would often spend 30-60 minutes, reading and learning about each new country.

We really liked how easy and fun the program was and how the boys could work independently. It was great to see how the boys went with memorising where each country is located in the world.

Overall, we really enjoyed using this curriculum. An idea that I thought of, that we couldn’t do at the moment, is to laminate some of the pages so that they can reuse them, like the traceable map. Our boys would have really enjoyed this as they were a little hesitant drawing free hand and would have liked the practice.

I also love how it can be used with a variety of ages and how the schedule allows you to add more and dig deeper if you wish. Relying on repetition, this program is simple to follow and allows room for more deeper study if you wish.

In addition to the Geography Drawing Series, Brookdale House has many other quality products available. To find out about some others, stop by more of the Schoolhouse Review Crew reviews!