Map reading is a valuable skill which anyone who has ever been lost knows all too well. Traveling through new cities and trying to locate landmarks is much easier following a map. Drawing maps and letting kids be the guide helps kids to develop this skill.
In conjunction with our daily walks the kids take turns selecting the route. In anticipation of her turn to lead the group my daughter drew her own map. She began with our house. Then added a few roads and the main buildings in town. Next she took a look at Google maps and added familiar trails. Her map is one step in developing her map reading skills.
Our village is surrounded by awesome trails. Some are paved and some are single track through the woods. I run daily and am familiar with many of them. To prepare for his turn as leader, my son researched area trails on Google maps. He found a few through the woods very close to the house that none of us had seen before. The trails were hidden because they begin at the end of driveways along the backyards of neighboring houses. His desire to explore and encouraging him to lead has improved his map reading skills as well.
After seeing the map of Oz in one of the books, Jemma created her map of Jemma land. It is labeled with hedgehog palaces, parks, ponds, pools and mountains.
I would love to hear about any maps your kids have drawn.
This post is linked to:
123 Homeschool 4 Me
Sun Scholars
Family Fun Friday
We've been drawing "Fire Escape Route" maps around here - which has led to interesting conversations about which windows would make escape paths and which wouldn't. Hopefully nobody tries to make any experiments.
ReplyDeleteMap skills are SO critical, even in this era of "I don't need directions, I have my GPS/iPhone/etc. My husband and I have been hard-core paper map users, until he got his smart phone. But, we discovered that the "dot" is not perfectly accurate when walking in large cities. It reinforced to us that we still need to teach some old-fashioned finding-your-way-about skills to our kids.
Thanks for telling me about the fire escape route map. That's a wonderful idea. I agree, paper map skills just aren't being practiced as much as before and we have to put extra effort in to ensure that skill is covered.
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