Teaching Map Skills to Children

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Laura from youngwritersworkshops.com, and I want to talk about teaching map skills to children. The early foundation of understanding about maps is just beginning to talk about locations, and that everything has a location. This is a really important idea for children to understand. They can begin to understand that things have a location and that location is relative to another location. You can also talk about maps when you talk about an event in the world. You can show on the map where that event is taking place, they can begin to have a concept of where things are in relation to other things. Then, once kids have that basic understanding about location, you can begin to talk about ordinal directions and using words like 'east' and 'south' when you describe things. You can arrows on your walls just showing east, west, north, south so that kids start to practice doing that. The east side of the school building or the east side of the classroom. They can begin to understand those ideas when you bring them into their daily lives. You also want to have them begin to make maps. They can make a map of their classroom, or of their school, of their schoolyard. They can start to plot things out and see how to represent them on paper. That's a good way for them to begin to understand mapping. You can also have them do games by giving them a map and then having them plot things on the map. They can also play games where they have to identify states or continents on a map, so they might have a blank map and they color in the states that they've visited. They have to be able to identify it and find it on the map and color it in. Puzzles and other objects that have maps on them are a good way for them to have more exposure. Assembling a puzzle of the United States or of the continent of Europe can really help them to build their understanding of the locations of things and to have practice using maps. So those are some ideas about teaching kids map skills."