Living here in Malaysia, it is sometimes difficult for us to keep ourselves and our kids informed of what is going on in the world outside of our little island. What little news we get here is usually strongly biased and rarely if ever comes from a biblical world view. That’s why I’m so excited to have found WorldKids magazine, a magazine for kids about current events from a Christian perspective.

This post is sponsored by World News Group. All opinions are my own. I’ve heard such wonderful things about these magazines for quite a while now, but I was under the impression that they were only available in print and to U.S. addresses. So when they offered to let me have an electronic version, I couldn’t sign up fast enough! I am excited to share our experience with WorldKids Magazine as well as some incredible freebies and an awesome giveaway!

WorldKids Magazine

WorldKids Magazine is produced by World News Group and is geared toward upper elementary-aged children. World News Group also publishes two other magazines for kids, God’s Big World for preschool and early elementary and WorldTeen Magazine for teens, as well as a magazine and online news outlet for adults which you can find more about here.

     

I chose to review WorldKids because my two oldest children are in that age bracket and love to help me with reviews! We received the September/October 2015 issue, and World News Group also sent us issues of God’s Big World and World Teen for these months as well! What a treat!

There are six issues of each magazine – one every other month. Each issue comes with online access to a downloadable version of the whole magazine and lots of online extras including videos, quizzes, games and new “news shorts” articles every day. You can also download extra activity pages for multiple students from the site. This is really exciting for us and other non-U.S. folks because it means we can subscribe and have them mailed to my parents in the U.S. and brought out to us once a year while still being able to access the online parts while they are current. They do offer international shipping but you need to call to find out if it’s available where you live and how much it will cost.

We’ll talk about WorldKids first, since that’s what we had chosen to review, and then give you just a couple of our thoughts about the other two. I have to admit that I read the magazine from cover to cover before handing it over to my kids! I had a really hard time putting it down and I learned a lot! Both my eight-year old and my eleven-year old absolutely loved it! They couldn’t come up with enough adjectives to describe how much they liked it. I heard “fascinating,” “amazing,” “stupendous,” “interesting,” and quite a few more. And of course, they begged me to subscribe immediately. And this was all before I told them about the online additions!

The magazines are full-color with beautiful pictures that you and your kids will want to pour over again and again. Here’s a screenshot of the table of contents:

And check out this spread on the California redwoods.

My favorite part were these news shorts. I loved the little snippets about things happening around the world. My eleven-year found these particularly fascinating as well.

The eight-year old enjoyed the whole magazine but loved the story about Amelia Earhart and the puzzles the most! (The puzzles gave me fond memories of reading Highlights magazines in my dentist’s office as a child!) This was her favorite page of all.

The story about truffle hunting dogs particularly captured the attention of all my kids, probably because they associate the word “truffle” with chocolate! Even though I explained several times that it was talking about mushrooms and they assured me they understood, they insisted that a good extension activity for this magazine would be a truffle hunt … using chocolate, of course. And who am I to say no to their ideas??? (We are, after all, talking about chocolate!)

When we finally checked out the online extras, we were pretty well sold. My eight-year old loves techy stuff so she was thrilled with this part. She even did a little unscripted mini-tour for you!

We also checked out the sample issues of God’s Big World and WorldTeen that were sent to us. WorldTeen was a huge hit, and my eleven-year old said she actually preferred it to WorldKids which I thought was interesting. She said it had more information and she really liked that. God’s Big World wasn’t as big of a hit for us though we still enjoyed it. The pictures are lovely but we found the text a bit too simplified to be able to read aloud and follow any kind of a train of thought. We found ourselves trying to fill in with necessary information so that it would make sense to my five-year old as well as the two-year old who was listening in, but they lost interest pretty quickly because the topic kept changing every page. They are more used to storybooks and books on one topic, but I assume they could get used to this pretty quickly if we tried, and I think it would be great for emerging readers. I think perhaps our ages were a little too young for this one. You should definitely give it a go if you have kids in this age range!

World News Group Magazine Freebie, Discount, and Giveaway!

World News Group has generously offered my readers the opportunity to download a FREE copy of whichever of their magazines interest you! Just click on the name of the magazine below and you’ll be taken directly to the freebie which you can save and enjoy!

God’s Big World – the magazine for preschool and early elementary aged students

WorldKids – for upper elementary students

WorldTeen – for teens (obviously!)

They are also offering a 15% discount for new yearly subscribers! Just click on “15% discount” in the previous sentence and you’ll be taken directly to the sign up page. No special code is needed to receive the discount!

And finally, World News Group is also sponsoring an amazing giveaway in which you can enter to win these awesome prizes valued at over $100!

• One Year Membership to the WNG magazine of your choice ($35.88 value)
• Preschool Bible Study Book: Kevin Tries on the Spiritual Armor
• Elementary Word Study Book: Adventures in Etymology
• Inspiration for Christian Teens: Start Here: Doing Hard Things Right Where You Are
• Three $20 Crossway Gift Cards

Best of luck!!!

a Rafflecopter giveaway