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Hi, I'm Laura from youngwritersworkshops.com and I'm going to talk about teaching map skills.
The basic, a good starting point in teaching map skills is to begin to talk about areas
of your classroom. Talk about what's in your classroom. You could draw a map together where
you start to visualize on paper what the space, how the space is laid out. You can also introduce
the idea of the ordinal directions, north, south, east, and west. And you can begin to
use those words when you talk about going to the drinking fountain which is north of
my desk. And that can help the kids to understand the directions and use that understanding
and put it, make it more concrete by actually doing it. Now, the next step in understanding
map skills would be for the kids to start to look at maps of your city and then again,
when you're planning an outing, plan your route, they can see where their house is on
the map and then also what the path is, which direction they're going to be going. Use those
ordinal directions, words, to discuss the trips you're taking as a group or that they
do on their own. You can move outwards then to maps of the US or the world and having
the kids map where they've been before. Mark on the map the places they've traveled to
or where their extended family lives can be another way for them to interact with the
map and start to see where things are on the map. You can talk about distances and scale.
Some of the scales that will help them be able to learn to read a map. You can bring
in some of the terms. Anytime you're learning about a place or discussing something that's
in the news you can pull out a map or a globe and help them to understand where it is in
relation to them. Using maps and globes just gives them good practice with these skills.
Other items like games or puzzles where they can interact with the map, looking at the
different parts of it closely in order to achieve their task can help them to have a
little bit better understanding of geography and they use of maps. So, those are some ideas
about building or teaching map skills.