I was sent some more books in the If You Were Me and Lived In…. series which as great books for introducing countries and their cultures to children – I was given Australia, Russia and Portugal this time and you can read the reviews of India and Turkey as well as Mexico, France, South Korea and Norway here on my blog as well. While these are geared towards children ages 3 to 8 years, they can actually be well suited to older children as well who may need a little push to become interested in geography and cultures. The books are short but big on information that concerns each country such as names for moms and dads, popular children’s names, foods, games and even popular sites to visit. A globe in the beginning shows your child where exactly the country is located on it’s continent as well as the shape of the country – which is great if you like to do mapping or just want to help your child’s geography skills. My only issue comes in the book about Australia – which mentions “People native to Australia have lived on this large island for over forty-thousand years” (page 20), since we believe in Creation Science and the Biblical account of Creation this isn’t something that we’d read, so I chose to skip it but wanted to let my readers know about this.



Overall, I’ve enjoyed this series, they are great books for when I need a break from ‘real’ school books but don’t want to not to do any learning and they are engaging with their cute and colorful illustrations depicting each country’s culture. In the back is a glossary of all the words used that are not English, including a pronunciation guide and a definition – the pronunciation guide is also included in the story as it’s read to help with the flow of reading the facts. I do highly recommend these books to anyone who wants to introduce geography and cultures to their young children or wants to spur an interest in it in an older child – they are inexpensive and some are available in e-book format as well for ease of taking on trips or outside the home. I also think most homeschool families would enjoy these additions to their home libraries for their own repeated and frequent use – it would also be easy to use these as a springboard to making your own unit studies.


**I was sent a copy from Red Feather Productions, unsolicited, in exchange for my honest opinion, no other compensation was given.