I loved this book. It helped me teach Canadian geography more easily than ever before and with better results.

The book consists of reproducible outline maps of Canada (about 25 maps) with a page of exercises for each one, plus additional review exercises. The map exercises cover provinces and territories, capital and other cities, and rivers and lakes. So many maps provide lots of review and practice on each topic. Each exercise asks students to repeat what they have done before, with a new twist.

Students in my class liked to do the exercises. We generally did two maps on each of three days a week. Students looked forward to doing them, and if they missed a day would ask me for the work they had missed. I could see that as we went on to other topics, putting in the names of all the provinces and territories became automatic for many students. Students became more familiar with cities, and the distinction between cities and provinces became clear.

The exercises make it relatively easy to deal with different levels of knowledge in the group. For example, some students who were familiar with most of the names were interested in the questions on relative sizes; they were especially interested in the challenge of drawing the boundaries between provinces. Less able students concentrated simply on getting the names in the right places. Doing the map work over many days gave us lots of opportunities to talk about what we knew about Canada, or what was in the news.

Another teacher using the book comments, “The maps are clear, attractive and up-to-date. The print is a good size.” A small laminated map in colour (8.5 x 11 inches) and a large wall map are also available. The book was meant for the K-12 system and asks students to do a lot of colouring; I made the colouring optional and didn’t get any negative feedback about it, nor about the name Smart Toys or the bear logo, both of which we had some reservations about.