Most Primary Social Studies Curriculums include Map Skills. First grade usually has map features and cardinal directions. Second grade usually includes landforms. The easiest way for primary students to understand map skills is to begin with maps of their own school or neighborhood.
Hands-On Makes it Better
Instead of completing unrelated worksheets, engage your kids in a class project. Mapping the neighborhood gives students the opportunity to see how common landmarks look on the map. Students can help decide what places are important enough to be included. You can decide as a class what symbols to use. Vote on the map title. Make an interactive legend.
Different Maps Different Skills
Many first grade curriculums include “Me on the Map” activities. These are great for map skills vocabulary. But, that is just the beginning. All you need to get started in white butcher paper. Obviously the bigger the map, the better for group work. Your students will learn to work together, to compromise, and to find creative solutions. Your kids will benefit from working on neighborhood maps, State maps, and weather maps.
Neighborhood Map
If you go to Google Maps, you can enlarge it until your school neighborhood is shown. If you click on map view, you can even see the outline of the houses, and which direction they face. You can get your attendance area for your school from the district’s website. From there, your students can find their house.
Check your objectives for the map skills you will work on:
- Kind of streets
- Relative location to the school
- businesses
- closest highway
- parks or green spaces
State Maps
Once you have experienced making a neighborhood or city map, the natural place to go would be to make a map of your state. With this, you can choose to highlight different map skills. Here again, check your district and state’s Social Studies objectives to see what to include on your map.
You could make one class map, or have each student fill in their own. There are many things you can include:
- American Indian lands
- rivers & lakes
- land forms
- highways
- major cities & capital
- Major Industry & businesses
Weather Maps
Kids love weather! Making seasonal weather maps can be fun and engaging while covering important objectives at the same time. Since weather is usually regional, that is another objective covered.
There are so many choices for weather maps:
- snow maps
- fall leaves maps
- beach maps
- hurricane maps
- harvest/crop maps
Map Skills Resources
All yObviously, the bigger the map, the better. The size helps make room for teamwork.
Teaching is a huge job. Just the day-to-day running of the classroom is a full time job. Add in lesson planning, behavior management, teachers meetings and you have at least 3 full-time jobs. Let me give you a leg up with a little lesson crafting. Click on one of the covers below to check out a done-for-you resource.
Thanks for reading. I hope you found an idea you can use.
Happy Teaching!
