I will be sharing some ways to make geography fun for young children.
When the girls were younger they really enjoyed watching Dora the Explorer. Originally my thinking was that the show would be a nice introduction to Spanish for the girls. I then realized it is a great show for an introduction to map skills. I love the way there are several landmarks they need to be looking for as Dora and Boots travel to their destination. I thought it would be fun to create a map of our town.
I found an aerial map of our town online and copied the main streets and river into a file folder. We live in a town that is only 1 mile around, so this was pretty easy. For bigger towns or cities you would probably want to concentrate on a smaller area to start with.
We went around town, taking pictures of important buildings and other landmarks. I printed out 2 copies of each picture. One copy went onto the map and then I covered the entire thing with clear contact paper (the poor man's laminator). Then I "laminated" the second set of pictures so they could be matched onto the map.
The idea is to take the map around town and match the landmarks as you go. You could also pick one as a destination and two or three others as stops along the route to plan fun activities (sort of like Dora). Another thought is to print a third set out and play a matching/memory game. The last landmark matched can be the destination for a fun trip.
Though we made the map a few years ago, we just recently used it as we took a walk around town in an attempt to fill in some more details about our town. I posted about this in my Poppins Book Nook post, Map Skills with Mapping Penny's World.
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What a GREAT idea! We might have to try something like this too. We love Dora and Diego!
ReplyDeleteThat is such a fun idea! My crew would love a map like that!
ReplyDeletewhat a great creative idea to teach young kids about geography. My kids love file folder games when they were younger.
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