Saturday, October 9, 2010

Geography and Maps

We began our Geography this week using Evan Moor's Beginning Geography and Lesson D3 in Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding.   The first few workpages in the Evan Moor were pretty easy for Georgie.   His favorite was one that involved tracing a path to find a treasure and then drawing what treasure was found.  He decided his treasure was "Three chocolate coins for three pirates.  Each pirate will get one coin." 

After explaining how maps are a picture of things how they would look from up above, we were going to draw a map of our living room.  Here is Georgie's map of my living room:
Interesting, yes?  I asked him to tell me about his picture.  It is our living room from WAY, WAY up in outer space.  This is an alien who is looking down at our planet as he stands among the stars.

We weren't able to get outside for our treasure map activity so we will continue our Geography/Map lessons as part of our core curriculum for the next couple of weeks.

We read a lot of books for this unit.  Unfortunately they need to be returned to the library so we won't be able to keep them on hand as we proceed forward.  There's A Map In My Lap is the only one we own at this time so we will just have to keep referring back to that one.  Thankfully, that seemed to be the book Georgie liked best (he is really into the Cat in the Hat these days).

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1 comment:

  1. I love the picture of the alien. Isn't it amazing that he is thinking about what earth would look like from the alien's perspective? I think it's great that you ask your kids to tell you about what they have drawn/painted; it's such a waste when parents just say something like "oh honey, that's a lovely picture, well done" and miss the thinking behind it.

    I'm going to check whether our library has any of the books, because we're planning to do a little unit on cartography too. We've been using a globe for a while, but the kids don't really seem to 'get' it, so dh thought that starting on a smaller scale might help.

    Ps, if you wanted to try a more conventional map of your room, you could offer an outline with some pictures of furniture to paste on in the appropriate places.

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