National Geographic Beginners World Atlas: Updated Edition

All the political maps and statistics have been updated in this award-winning book. The society's world-renowned cartographers, working with education consultants and geographers have created a state-of-the-art world atlas for children ages 5 to 8. Large, easy-to-read maps introduce youngsters to the world and each of its continents. Full-color photographs, carefully selected for their appeal to young children, supplement the maps and make people, places, and natural wonders come to life. Through simple but fact-filled text, children begin exploring the world by learning about maps and how to read them. Then they begin their continent-by-continent tour. Each continent begins with a welcome from a young native child, followed by an illustrated physical map with brief bulleted discussions of land regions, water, climate, plants, and animals. Similar treatment is given to the political map except the topics are countries, cities, people, languages, and products. Each spread features full-color images that are keyed to the maps. Backmatter includes a map keyed to a chart of geographic superlatives, a glossary, a pronunciation guide, and an index.

All the political maps and statistics have been updated in this award-winning book. The society's world-renowned cartographers, working with education consultants and geographers have created a state-of-the-art world atlas for children ages 5 to 8. Large, easy-to-read maps introduce youngsters to the world and each of its continents. Full-color photographs, carefully selected for their appeal to young children, supplement the maps and make people, places, and natural wonders come to life. Through simple but fact-filled text, children begin exploring the world by learning about maps and how to read them. Then they begin their continent-by-continent tour. Each continent begins with a welcome from a young native child, followed by an illustrated physical map with brief bulleted discussions of land regions, water, climate, plants, and animals. Similar treatment is given to the political map except the topics are countries, cities, people, languages, and products. Each spread features full-color images that are keyed to the maps. Backmatter includes a map keyed to a chart of geographic superlatives, a glossary, a pronunciation guide, and an index.

Sally J. K. Davies - Children's Literature

This truly is a beginner's atlas. The book opens with a chapter explaining how a map is made and how to use one. Young children will like the explanation of various viewpoints. There are illustrations of a normal viewpoint of a typical suburban house, then one at a higher vantage point, and one at a bird's eye view. It clearly shows how a map is similar to a bird's eye view, except it has symbols to represent things that do not move. Readers can see a swing set or house in the first illustration and can try to find it in the other viewpoints or on the map. This first chapter also discusses and defines a map, a compass, a map key, a map scale, how mapmakers translate a round globe into a flat map, a map of the physical planet earth, a political map of the world showing countries, and a few pages to help the reader understand how an atlas works. The next seven chapters each highlight a different continent and each has its own bright color to differentiate chapters. Each of the continent chapters has three double-page spreads with many colorful photographs. The first spread page has a big photograph of a scene typical of the area, an introductory paragraph, and a photograph of a child saying hello in her own native language and introducing herself in English. The next spread includes a few short paragraphs about the land, water, climate, plants, and animals. The accompanying full-page map of the featured continent shows major land formations, as well as mountain, desert, rainforest, wetland, grassland, forest, tundra, ice cap, and glacier regions. There are no longitude or latitude markings on these maps. The final spread is about the people, countries, cities, languages, and products of thecontinent. The map for this section has the countries and major cities marked. The only exception to this continent chapter format is in North America, where an additional two spreads highlight the countries of the United States and Canada. The back matter contains a glossary, a list of native language greetings that appear within the text, and a page filled with trivia on the longest, highest, largest, smallest, and most populated areas on our planet. This book is part of National Geographic's "Atlas" series, which includes the titles Our World: A Child's First Picture Atlas, World Atlas for Young Explorers, National Geographic Beginner's World Atlas, United States Atlas for Young Explorers, and National Geographic Student Atlas of the World. 2005, National Geographic, Ages 5 to 8.