Map My Country

Map My Country is part of the new “Mapping My World” series from Crabtree Publishing. Author Harriet Brundle has written all four books in the series: Map My Community, Map My Planet, Map My Country and Map My School.

Each book follows a consistent format but uses different illustrations to reflect the content focus. The opening chapters explain what a map is, how to use a map, what a map legend is, and how to use a map scale. Each book in the series then explores different aspects of a specific type of map.

Map My Country focuses on country maps with chapters including Mapping a Country, and How Do We Use Country Maps?

Each book concludes with a mapping activity. The activity in Map My Country assigns the student the job to “create a map to help a visitor plan their trip to your country”. One of the guiding questions is, “What would you like to know about a new country?” It seems unfortunate that the author has chosen to give six possible answers to this question instead of allowing the students to come up with answers by themselves.

Map My Country includes a table of contents, and a simple glossary and index.

Illustrations are very colorful, and the large clear font makes the text very legible for young readers. The book includes illustrations of maps of several countries. A map of Canada is used to illustrate the topic, Using a Map, and also as an example of a landform map.

There are a few features of the book which may be confusing. On page 5, the text tries to explain the difference between a paper map and a digital map using an illustration of a map within the frame of a digital device.

This digital map shows the countries on Earth.

Using an illustrated picture of a map printed in a book and labelling it a digital map is unnecessarily confusing.

On page 7, the Legend says country borders are solid lines and state borders are outlined by dashes. In fact, on the map, both state and country borders are solid lines.

Page 12 includes a large size map of “Counties of Great Britain”. The main text on the page explains that physical maps show “the shapes of land, called landforms. Examples of landforms include rivers and mountains”.

A text box near the bottom of the page refers to the map on the page.

This is a political map. It shows how borders divide big areas into smaller areas. For example, countries can be divided into states, provinces, or counties.

Although these are small concerns, in a book helping young students learn how to make meaning from maps, they are more confusing than clarifying.

Overall, I recommend Map My Country for young readers learning about maps for the first time with assistance and for slightly older students exploring maps in more depth independently.