Seven Things To Do With Maps
Maps are not just about geography and the earth's terrain. They are a crucial tool to understanding everything from world political history to adventures of heroes both real and fictional. Skills developed in map reading include planning, orienteering and keeping a sense of direction, understanding and computing distance, reading a map legend like a code, and gaining additional perspective on the world. Maps tell stories!
7 Activities with Maps for Kids
Young children ages 3-8 will enjoy making a map of their block or their immediate neighborhood- any place they know well. Start by walking around the area with a sketch pad and pencil to make sketches and take notes. The map can be drawn from a bird’s-eye view like an aerial diagram, or as a cityscape with a frontal view of the buildings. Finish the map at home, adding color and perhaps figures and objects. When you are done, mark an arrow to indicate the direction of north. This can be a capital letter N inside an upside down V with the point aiming north. If you like, create a map legend, using symbols explained in an inset box. You can create symbols for: pizza restaurants, subway stations, bus stops, the library, etc. A beautiful example of a front view of a local neighborhood is Romare Bearden's The Block, done in collage. This great work of art hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. Take a close-up look on-line. Older kids can make a larger or more complicated map of their neighborhood, playground, mall, or park, or perhaps a town or county that includes their home or their friends' or grandparents' homes.
When you take a subway or bus to your destination, kids can use a subway or bus map to trace their route with a colored marker or highlighter pen. Marking and mapping your journey as you take it gives you a birds-eye perspective at the same time as you absorb other views. You have to look out the window to see where you are and where you're going, and then look at an aerial view to trace it. Each child can each have his or her own map and marker. Bus and subway maps are free and can be obtained at libraries, subway ticket booths, on buses, and downloaded online. You can do this whenever you travel, whether by car, plane, train, etc. I drove cross country with my family more than once, and we stopped at travel centers to pick up free road maps. My kids each traced their journey, sometimes writing small comments on the map, and circling spots where we stopped.
When visiting a zoo or museum, get a map for each person and use them to get from one place to another. When you are done with your visit, mark every place you went. Add one-word comments on the map about the things you saw in the places (on the map) where you saw them. Many museums have special children's maps that you can request at the information desk. Take an extra map home, unused, for a scrapbook, or to turn into a book cover, or to include in a work of collage art. Here’s the online map for kids to the Metropolitan Museum, with colored dots you can zoom in on to discover more.
Put a map on the wall, either of the USA or of the world, and make it interactive. Find postcards, quotations, poems, photos, etc., from or about various places on that map, and put them on the wall around the map. Connect each one to its corresponding place with a piece of yarn that is taped, tacked or pinned to both wall and map. Ask your friends who travel to mail you postcards and add them to the wall. When you read stories by authors from different places, use the wall map to mark those places with colored stickers showing where the author came from.
Go to the library and find short stories or poems about the USA, such as . As you learn about a state or travel to a place, read poems about those places. (Recommended books of NYC poems are below.) Find a location on a city map that corresponds to the poem, or perhaps the street or area where the poet lived. Add these poems next to your wall map. As you find new poems about places, replace the ones that have been up for a while. Consider these books for poems about New York City.
Street Music: City Poems by Arnold Adoff, contains a poem with the sounds of the city, for ages 5-9.
My America: A Poetry Atlas of the United States by Lee Bennett Hopkins, for ages 8-12.
The Poetry of US: More Than 200 Poems That Celebrate the People, Places and Passions of the United States by J. Patrick Lewis, ages 8-12.
Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes by David Roessel (ed.), for ages 8-12.
Poetry for Kids: Walt Whitman by Karen Karbeiner (ed.), for ages 8-13.
Create an imaginary map of an imaginary place. This idea was inspired by fictional books with maps on the inside cover, like Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne, and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, who is said to have imagined his story Treasure Island by first drawing a map of the place. The imaginary map you make might lead to story writing!
Create personalized place names on an actual map. Take a map of any place you know well, and write over the place names using your own associations. Using a NYC subway map, the Hudson River could be renamed River of Dreams or Palisades Trail River (especially if you have walked that trail). Broadway might become Mary Poppins Avenue or Lion King Way, using the name of any show you saw or wanted to see. Lincoln Center could be renamed Dancer's Heaven (honoring the ballet) or Aria Place (honoring the opera) for Fountain Square. The more personal the name, the better. Print the new place name using a small sized font on your computer, and tape or glue the new name over the commonly used name already on the map. When you are finished, it will look like a real map, but it will be a reflection of your memories and personal story. This project makes a good gift or greeting card for a friend or relative with shared memories.
When your maps get old and dated, don't throw them away. Instead, turn them into projects! Use maps to cover books containing stories about that place, travel guides, personal poems about places, travel diaries, journals, scrapbooks and more.
Where to Get Maps
City bus and subway maps are free, obtainable at libraries, subway stations, and on buses. AAA members can pick up road maps for free at a local AAA office, or download free maps. Tourist bureaus and visitor centers have free maps. It’s worth a visit to a tourist bureau, or pausing at a Welcome Center off the interstate highway (usually near the state border) just to get maps! Brochures (also free at Visitor or Welcome Centers) often contain local maps too.
Download Equal Earth Projection maps online.
Learn about projections and map distortion. See the Hobo Dyers Equal Area Map upside down in this article online. Compare different map projections online.
Books About Maps
For young children
Mapping Penny's World by Loreen Leedy. Penny is a dog, and the maps are of places where she hangs out (bedroom, neighborhood, park, etc.), a fun introduction to maps for ages 3-8.
Me on the Map by Joan Sweeney, shows maps from small places (a child's room, house, street, etc.) to larger places (state, country, world), from a child's point of view, for ages 3-6.
As the Crow Flies: A First Book of Maps by Gail Hartman and Harvey Stevenson, shows maps that different animals might use, ages 3-8.
Follow That Map!: A First Book of Mapping Skills by Scot Ritchie, introduces the compass rose, latitude and longitude, scale indicators, and more, for ages 4-6.
My Map Book by Sara Fanelli, a visual and conceptual array of maps without narrative, including the maps of a family, a day, a dog, and a child's heart, for ages 4-8.
Geography from A to Z: A Picture Glossary: A First Atlas for Beginning Explorers by Jack Knowlton, defines 63 geographical terms with illustrations, including terms like: badlands, gulch, isthmus, and plateau, for ages 6-10.
For older children and all ages
Maps by Aleksandra Mizielinska, include cultural facts and trivia about many places, for ages 5-adult.
Eat Your Way Through the USA by Loree Pettit, a cookbook that makes a good companion to studying US geography, for ages 6 and up.
Maps, an issue of Discovery Kids that shows the distortion in all world maps by comparing different projections, and has a hands-on exercise to help you truly understand why distortion is inevitable. For ages 7-12.
Mapmaking with Children: Sense of Place Education in the Elementary Years by David Sobel, with hands-on techniques for children of all ages.
Prisoners of Geography: Our World Explained in 12 Simple Maps by Time Marshall (Young Readers Edition), for ages 8 and up.
North American Maps for Curious Minds: 100 New Ways to See the Continent by Matthew Bucklan and Victor Cizek (one in a series), for ages 8-adult.
Map Art Lab: 52 Exciting Art Explorations in Map Making, Imagination, and Travel by Jill K. Berry and Linden McNeilly (part of Lab for Kids series), project-based learning combining art with geography, for ages 8-adult.
Parent's Comment on this article, with another great tip:
One thing my kids have always loved is to do is "scavenger hunts" on a map. I make up a list of things to find (three lakes in Minnesota, a river that branches off of the Ohio, five cities with a population of more than 500,000, three states that have a city named Springfield, etc) and then it's up to them to find everything on the list. They will ask for this for weeks on end. We have found it useful to rotate maps, too, so there's something that feels new to look at. Some books, like the wonderful Adam of the Road by Elizabeth Janet Gray, really need a map of the country (in that case, England) to go along. And don't forget to use Google Maps to see what things look like at street level! ~J. A., homeschooling parent
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