This is a Mama Buzz review. The product was provided by: Knowledge Quest for this review.

For some reason my educational memories seem to be completely bereft of historical maps – perhaps this is because the study of history is becoming increasingly negligent in the public school system.  Until I started homeschooling I didn’t even realize that there was such a resource as a historical atlas!  Thankfully, experienced homeschooling, history savvy moms are creating new routes into the past for those of us lacking such an aptitude to follow.

Terri Johnson is well known for her Knowledge Quest historical outline maps.  They had been on my short list of potential purchases for some time when her new historical map series Map Trek released last year.  I snatched up my copy of volume 1, Ancients, as quickly as possible to help us in our study of ancient history using Mystery of History Volume 1.  When I received the opportunity to review volume 2, Medieval World how could I resist?

Now, why am I so excited about these Map Trek e-books anyway?  1. Terri makes historical map work EASY. 2. The maps are lovely.

On to the details! Map Trek is a collection of chronologically arranged (and dated) historical outline maps, with student versions (blank with little coloration), teacher versions (more color with full details – like an answer key) and the best part is that Terri provides a teaching plan that you can use to engage your students in hands-on mapping activities for three levels of difficulty.  Level A provides plans for grades 1 – 4, level B grades 5 – 8, and level C grades 9 – 12.  Reproducible within your family means you only need one copy of Map Trek to teach all of your children for now and the future.

You can either use Map Trek Medieval World to supplement a chronological history program and assign maps as they correlate to the lessons, or pull out specific maps relating to historical fiction or biographies you may be studying.   A map related to the Reformation for example, shows the locations of the vitally important cities (Worms, Wittenberg etc.) while also displaying which regions became Protestant (at which date), which remained Catholic, and which were mixed. A detailed map of the black death shows the spread of the disease by year, maps are provided showing the routes of Christopher Columbus, the early explorers, and the later explorers.  When all is said and done there are 34 maps included from the years 565 (the Byzantine Empire) through to 1580 (the Spanish and Portuguese Empires.)

I do have a few minor quibbles – the book lacks page numbers which makes it difficult for moms to use the table of contents after they’ve printed the e-book.  The northern portion of North America (where Canada will one day exist) on the world map is sorely devoid of any geographical features – the rockies seem to stop in the portion of the continent that will become the United States, and no major waterways are depicted.  As a Canadian this does admittedly irk me.

What truly won me over however, was the fact that this is an all-in-one resource.  Yes, the student maps can be given to your children along with a historical atlas to work from, but you can also give them the teacher maps to work from if you don’t own a historical atlas.  Because it can be notoriously difficult to find all of the necessary information from a single historical atlas (none seem to be comprehensive enough) each Map Trek volume is a very economical choice to get started with historical map work.

Map Trek is a huge time saver for me, and has eliminated so much bumbling around, not knowing what to do, and countless hours of research.  Why not check out the full list of maps, and grab the samples available for download here and see what you think!  Each volume is available for $14.95 as an instant download, and two future volumes are planned (New World and Modern World.)