Map Adventures
Introduction:
Map Adventures, with seven accompanying lessons, is appropriate for grades K-3. Students will learn basic concepts for visualizing objects from different perspectives and how to understand /and use maps.
The lessons center on a story about a little girl named Nikki. Nikki goes up in an unplanned balloon ride that gives her, and the students, different views of a park.
Included in this package are:
- Seven lesson plans
- A picture of a hot-air balloon
- Four activity sheets
- 15 reproducible black-and-white sections of a park map that can be made into a poster
The poster in this teaching package, made from the 15 reproducible images, shows different views of the same place (a park) from different perspectives. It includes three illustrations of the park: a ground view (illustration 1), a view from a higher point (illustration 2), and an overhead view (illustration 3). The three illustrations correspond to parts of a story about an adventure a little girl has in a park.
The illustrations will help your students move from visualizing objects from the most familiar perspective (a ground view) to the overhead view represented by most maps. This is the most basic and necessary skill in helping students understand and use maps.
The lesson plans also introduce the concept of how symbols are used on maps to represent objects or features. It is not possible to show everything about a place on one map and still make it easy to read and understand. So mapmakers use symbols for many different kinds of features or objects. Another key point is learning to use map legends.
Objectives:
- To learn about perspective and representation of space from above ground level.
- To teach students how to identify and read map legends to understand what a map is intending to show.
- Students will learn about map scale and how large amounts of space can be represented on paper.
Instructions:
Follow the lesson plans and activities with the PDFs that can be found above or download the entire lesson plan here.