Activity Atlas: The World at Your Fingertips

Sandy Campbell is a reference librarian in the Science and Technology Library at the University of Alberta.

This highly engaging atlas comes with sticker flags of all the
countries, stickers of points of interest and wildlife, a “passport”
with visa stickers, and postcards with fill-in-the-blanks reviews of
each continent. The pages are very sturdy and high-gloss, so that the
stickers can be removed and replaced.

The flag stickers have named boxes where they can be attached. The
other stickers are more challenging because they have a grid number
written on them and the child must find the appropriate location on the
map to affix them. Once the stickers are all in place, the child
supposed to remove them, place them on the appropriate pages of the
passport, and then re-ward himself or herself with the visa sticker. (My
seven-year-old and ten-year-old found that it was more fun just to leave
the stickers in the book.)

This is a high-interest book that kept my children busy for hours. They
did not pay much attention to the printed content unless I pointed it
out to them, but on their own they did take note of capital cities,
where the countries were, and some of the special-interest stickers. It
is a fairly good home-learning exercise and will have some long-term
application. Highly recommended as a family activity.