Draw the USA Review

One of my goals this year is for the kids to understand state geography a little better than before. To that end, we requested Draw the USA: an Easy Step by Step Approach by Kristen J Draeger from Timberdoodle. They gave us the hook up in exchange for this review.

What is Draw the USA? Exactly what it claims to be — a step by step, page by page guide with explicit, simple directions on drawing the United States one state at a time.

How’d my kid do? Mary is 11 and fairly artistic (albeit a bit spatially-challenged like her mom). The step by step directions helped her navigate how the states fit together. She found New England a little tricky. There was some muttering under her breath and a fair amount of erasing, but she came through on her own.

Why use Draw the USA? If you’d like your child to be able to draw a map freehanded and likely memorize the state placement and abbreviations.

As Montessori says, “What the hand does, the mind remembers.”
Draw a map of the USA and the brain internalizes it.

Now that we’ve used this book once (the whole map drawing process was done over two days in about 30 mins at a time), and the novelty of having drawn the USA is done with, I do think it’ll be easy to get them to revisit this guide. I can foresee us doing extensions with color coding or adding in physical geography (would have loved to see some features, but alas there’s just state boundaries in this book). What I originally thought would be fun would be to use this to draw our own maps with the Montessori economic geography. I planned to get to that last year and still haven’t worked it into our schedule this year — but maybe, just maybe we’ll get there yet.

Overall I liked Draw the USA a lot. I think the results are fairly impressive. I’d love to see my kids attempt a giant painted version. Wouldn’t that look cool? As far as learning about the states, mission accomplished. Going to take a few more run throughs but again, I liked this book a lot and recommend it from Timberdoodle.