Explore the World in Color: Smithsonian Children's Illustrated Atlas Review

If you’re looking for a fun and engaging atlas for your children, this atlas review is for you.

The Smithsonian Children’s Illustrated Atlas provides a fun and informative trip around the world. The vibrant colors and engaging artwork introduce children to the coral reefs of the Caribbean before transporting them over the mountains of Chile all the way to the snowcapped mountains of the Himalaya.

This easy-to-read Atlas even offers introductory pages with simple “How to Read” guides. The language throughout the book is simplistic without losing important information, and the value and importance of each country is effectively highlighted.

Children’s Atlas Review: Grade Level

Younger children and early readers alike will love looking at the pictures. Even without strong reading skills, children will recognize each country’s unique food, animals, and musical instruments through their images.

Advanced reading skills will allow children to dive deeper into the information in the book. They’ll be able to read the detailed captions and learn more through each image’s descriptions.

Children’s Atlas Review: Continents and Countries

Each continent and country is broken down page-by-page and explored individually.

The engaging images combined with the detailed captions make it easy for young minds to absorb the information and recall it at a later time.

Oceans, rivers, lakes, and mountains are also covered on pages of their own.

Although it doesn’t have a page for every world country, it does cover a significant number of them. Some countries are grouped together because of similarities, which makes things easier for a younger child.

If you use this atlas alongside the Let’s Go Geography curriculum, there may be rare times when you don’t have a matching atlas entry for your lesson, but these weeks would be few & far between. If & when a country page is not available, you could read the continent page for that country instead.

Children’s Atlas Review: Country Highlights

If you’ve ever wondered how many different cheeses are made in France or which country’s cricket team is the best in the world, this Atlas has that information and more tucked inside for you.

Fun facts and random trivia for each country are sprinkled throughout, which makes reading about each country an exciting new adventure.

Children’s Atlas Review: The Final Word

All in all, I hope that this atlas review helped you to know that this is a very thorough and detailed atlas for kids. It can be a great resource for anyone wanting to learn more about a specific country, but kids especially can benefit from all of the color and photos used on each page.

To help the learning go even deeper, the Let’s Go Geography curriculum offers fun & engaging lessons on 30+ world countries each year. The curriculum offers coloring pages, flags, maps, crafts, and other activities to keep kids excited & engaged in discovering more about the globe.