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Evan-Moor Daily Geography Practice Curriculum Review


Daily Geography Practice is a geography workbook for elementary students published by Evan-Moor. I’ve used it to teach homeschool geography with two of my kids, most recently for 3rd and 6th grades. Each time I’ve used it, we’ve used it for the entire school year and completed the workbook.

FYI, if you’re interested in more curriculum reviews, check out my review page. You may also be interested in our past curriculum choices.

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Daily Geography Practice Review

How It Works

Daily Geography Practice is based on the 18 National Geography Standards – whatever those are. But it sounds good and I can say that the workbooks we’ve used seem extremely comprehensive in their geography instruction.

Each workbook has 36 Lessons, with each lesson focusing on a different skill. Each lesson consists of a map page (1 new map per lesson) and a question page. Each question page has 10 questions broken up over 5 days, with two questions per page. There is also a Challenge question.

The focus of Daily Geography Practice is mapping skills with a little bit of work on landforms & waterways. The teacher’s manual also contains some geography vocabulary.

What Do You Need to Purchase?

On the Evan-Moor website, you’ll find a teacher’s manual and stand-alone Student Practice Book for each grade. You can purchase the teacher’s book as either a physical book or e-book.

I would say that the teacher’s manual is a must-have. It contains the answer key and background information to help you introduce the new geography skill each week. I used the background information as a script when I sat with my students at the beginning of each lesson.

The teacher book also contains reproducible student pages. So if you purchase the ebook version of the teacher book, you can simply print out the student pages. Unfortunately, the student pages are not all together in one spot, so printing them out is a little tricky.

For this reason, purchasing the stand-alone Student Practice Book could be a time-saver, even if you end up taking apart the book when you prep your curriculum for the school year.

Additional Purchases

Daily Geography Practice does not have a supplies list that I noticed, but I would recommend having the following on hand:

  • Globe – A basic globe is helpful when discussing the differences between a globe and a flat map.
  • Map of the United States with state names – There were a few questions that required my students to refer to a map to get the names of particular states.
  • Crayons/colored pencils – There was a little bit of coloring on maps, at least for the younger grades.
  • Supervised internet access – There were a few instances when my 6th grader’s Challenge question required a little bit of internet research. My 6th grader does have access to Britannica Kids on his laptop, but there were times that I had to sit with him to Google something.

Teacher Prep Time

If you choose to use Daily Geography Practice, I recommend you do the following before the beginning of the school year:

  • Determine how often your student will work in the workbook. For example, will you use it as designed – 5-days a week, two questions per day? Just once a week, completing the entire lesson in one sitting? Or some other option?
  • If you purchase the e-book teacher’s book and not the student practice book, you’ll need to print & assemble the student pages, as well as the teacher pages if you want a physical copy of the answer keys.
  • Before each weekly lesson, you may want to review the background information on the teacher page. But honestly, I never did. I sat with each of my kids on Mondays (the day we began each lesson) and used the background information as a script. We then went over the vocabulary provided on the teacher page. In all, actual teaching time took about 10-15 minutes per lesson, plus the time it took me to check their work every day.

Student Time

The amount of time required from your students to complete this curriculum will depend on their grade level and how you actually use these workbooks, but in general:

  • At the beginning of each lesson – About 10 minutes of one-on-one teaching time with parent so that you can introduce the lesson, the geography standard it covers, and go over vocabulary.
  • Each set of 2 questions – 1-10 minutes, but most likely less than ten minutes.
  • Total time for each lesson (including one-on-one teaching time and completion of the 10 questions and the Challenge question) – less than an hour.

How Do I Rate Daily Geography Practice?

My personal (feelings-based) rating of these geography workbooks is 5 stars, but the rating based on the criteria detailed above comes to abut 3.5 stars.

To whom would I recommend Daily Geography Practice?

(Based on Learning Preferences and Three D’s I describe in earlier posts.)

Since this is a workbook-based curriculum, I would say that the best fit would be students that have a preferred Learning Method of the Written Word and a Social Setting preference for Independent work, but you could make thoughtful adaptations to your students’ particular preferences/needs.

My Best Tips for Using Daily Geography Practice

  • Have a globe and U.S. map with states handy.
  • If printing from the ebook, print Map Pages alone and hole-punch so map faces Questions Page.
  • Keep the answer key handy, even if you don’t think you’ll need it.

The Last Thing You Need to Know about Daily Geography Practice

Even though they are not written for homeschoolers, the Daily Geography Practice workbooks are my favorite resource for teaching homeschool geography because they are extremely comprehensive and grade-level appropriate.

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