Book Review: Galloping the Globe

When I set out to design a year of unit studies for my incoming 4-Yr Pre K and 1st grade students, I needed something that was really, really broad but had a thread of unity as well. What better subject to cover than geography! Besides the fact that kids really need geography to better understand the world, its cultures and history, geography could easily be adapted to both learning levels and give us a lot of fun opportunities to do things "out of the box."


I searched the internet for sources for ideas. One source really stuck out for me, Galloping the Globe. For one thing, it's a single book and the cost was very low ($24.95). Also, it was written for Pre-K through 4th grade (hence, it's very flexible). I have yet to hear anyone who just loved one of these big-box cirricula for every subject (and 2 different grades). So, I took a little extra time to put everything together myself. If this is what you want to do, Galloping the Globe is great. If you're looking for something that can get you through a unit without needing the library or other textbooks, this is not for you.

How it works for me:

The book is laid out very well, with an overview of world geography at the beginning and each continent broken down into its' major countries of study. For the month of December, there is also a "Christmas Around the World unit." For each country, you get a black and white map and black and white flag, both of which can be photocopied for your kids to color and put into their binder. The larger units come with additional aides like mazes and word searches to use. You also get a paragraph introducing the country and a list of books and ideas in most subject areas: geography, history and biographies, literature, language arts, science, Bible, and a list of activities you can do. You will need an additional math cirriculum and possibly grammar as well. I also used a phonics cirriculum for my PreK student. I will caution you, I couldn't find a lot of the books on the suggested list at my local library. However, this has never bothered me. The ones I did find were great and I easily supplemented other books to cover the topics I chose to do. The flexibility of this guidebook is that you can cover the subjects you like within the unit and also outside the unit. I'm using a separate science textbook but the kids like studying the animals within each country we study. This way, they get the best of both worlds. Do your kids already get Bible from another course? Then don't use that section. We decided to create a book over the year with captioned pictures from each country we studied. This is not a part of the Galloping the Globe cirriculum but it's the biggest part of what we do with the subjects they outline. Also, you don't have to cover each and every country. I skipped a few and I'm also adding a few that they don't cover.


The list of activities was very useful. Yes, I could have brainstormed a lot of these ideas myself without the books' help. But let's face it, how much easier is it to have a list in front of you to use when you're already the busiest person on the planet?? Plus, when brilliance strikes and you think of something extra or even better than what's in the book - you're not nailed down to anything so go ahead and do it! I was so proud of a few of my own ideas but didn't feel the pressure each week to come up with new and better stuff!


My recommendation:

The beauty of homeschooling is the flexibility you can have and I think that it gets lost inside some of the huge boxed cirriculums out there. That said, my kids are really young and the subjects aren't that complex as of yet. For us, using the library and getting our hands in what we're learning made this year really fun, positive and informative. Galloping the Globe allowed us to study the greater subject of geography in depth and gave us a sense of unity to the year. It was a great source of books and ideas for our year and I do recommend it for anyone interested in geography unit studies.