Community+Map+Strategy

Community Map Strategy V K-2 V 3-5 V 6-8 II Time, Continuity, and Change III People, Places, and Environments VI Power, Authority, and Governance VII Production, Distribution, and Consumption Students can create a map of their community, indicating the streets and other important markers with labels. This activity can be modified for younger students; they find their way to school and back home again by mapping all the streets between the two sites. Children can begin by mapping their playground, their school, or their room at home. They can use wooden blocks to represent many of these things even before they are ready for paper representation. Students of all ages can use school milk cartons and shoe boxes to represent houses, schools, factories, shopping centers, service providers, and social organizations. Intermediate students can plan a community or reflect on the decisions city planners made for their community regarding land usage. Older students can begin to think about zoning, city planning, and balancing the needs of different people in the community. This strategy encourages students to examine and evaluate land usage, laws that protect the community and citizens, and ways the community helps people. • Ask parents and older siblings to help younger students look for and discuss the meaning of street signs, lights, and pavement marks as they travel through the community. Have students bring boxes and cardboard to school. • Have students build a small model of the school using a small box covered with paper. • Using a map, help students locate where they live. Provide assistance as they create the roads that get them from their home to school: Use large sections of cardboard or large sheets of kraft paper for the map's surface and represent the streets with masking tape. Label streets with permanent marker. • Have each student write his or her street address on a model of his or her home or apartment and then locate his or her residence on the appropriate street. This strategy works best with neighborhood schools because of the close proximity of homes to the school. However, students can also map specific districts or areas of larger communities. • In class, have students make a list of all the places they go after school and on weekends. As a homework assignment, have students ask their parents to list all the places they go during the day. Request that families discuss with young students the purposes of the buildings they visit frequently. This could include the post office, school, employment locations, malls, grocery stores, and courthouse or other government buildings. • Referring to these lists, have students create shopping, service, factory, and office districts on their maps. Encourage students to reflect on the relationships among these areas and determine the best arrangement for all the people in the community. • Have students navigate toy cars or buses through 'the streets, identifYing areas where drivers need to cooperate. Have them establish rules for driving in their "community." • As a corollary activity, have students evaluate signs that give information; they can determine when signs are nuisances and when they provide useful information. Students in a second-grade class used construction paper to "pave" the streets on their maps and to cover boxes for homes, businesses, government buildings, and factories. They created a grid of streets replicating those in their community. Students created advertising media for their businesses so that they could find out what other businesses sold. As students carried out their tasks, teachers posed questiOlis such as the following: • How will we plan our city so that people can easily find things? • How can the post office and the delivery people know where we live? • Why do we have stop signs in some areas and not in others? • What happens if we have too many or too few stop signs? • Where should we put our houses, shopping centers, and factories? • What might happen if they are too close or too far away from our homes? • Where should we put the bus station, the train station, and the airport? Why? • What is outside our city? Extending tlle conversation into an examination of public policy, students converted half of their classroom floor into an area in which to experiment with local public policy in relation to traffic laws and ordinances on land usage. They determined which policies and laws helped which people the most and which, if any, should be abolished. REFERENCES AND RESOURCES Bennett, L. (1997). Geography and the national parks. Social Studies &the YOung Learner; 9(3), 14. Benson, J. S. (2000). Centerville/Centerville: An exercise in mental mapping. Teacher's notebook. Journal of Geography) 99(1),32-35. Chicola, N. A., & English, E. B. (1999). Discovering world geography with books kids love. Golden, CO: Fulcrum.