World Geography in Christian Perspective, second edition, is a soft-cover geography text that is intended to be used as a one-semester course for ninth grade. Because it is intended for a semester rather than a year, it covers many countries of the world very briefly. The first chapter begins with a very general introduction of geography: discussing geographical terms and categories, culture and government, and maps and charts. Subsequent chapters discuss the different regions of the world, with a chapter for each continent.
Each chapter contains charts with profiles and flags of all the countries in the regions of each continent. There are review questions in each chapter that most often deal with the knowledge of facts and comprehension; a few questions deal with application, analysis, synthesis, or evaluation.
This book, though intended for high schoolers, would work well with upper elementary and middle school students. It seems to primarily focus on the location of the countries of the world and a few facts about them and does not cover geographical topics and issues of culture in much depth.
A Beka publishes a teacher guide for the book that includes a suggested schedule for a class and an answer key to the questions in the book. The schedule is superfluous for most homeschoolers and I'm not sure the answer key would be worth the price. There is also a Map Studies book available at a very reasonable price, and it includes maps to fill in and questions for study to aid in memorization. This seems to me to be a worthwhile purchase, and could even be used alone with an atlas for younger children. If you are interested in your children learning the names and facts of the countries of the world, as well as a few geographical terms and topics, this text is a good choice. If you are looking for a text that studies geography in-depth and helps students think through issues of culture, other choices would be better.[Reviewed by Becky Parker and Cathy Duffy]
