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Take a Look At. . . Primary Circle
Take a Look at Grades 1 and 2....by Jane White, Primary Circle Teacher
A mapmaking project recently undertaken by the 1-2 groups is part of the groups’ yearlong theme of Community, which integrates social studies, language arts, science, art, music and computer technology. One of the guiding questions of that study is “What can we learn about the people (past and present), animals and plants in communities in and around our school?”
We began by studying communities we’re all a part of, our classroom, school
and family communities. From there, we extended our view of community to the
animal and plant community in the nature preserve that surrounds our school.
We’re studying the geography and ecosystems of the land and learning the
importance of conservation.
Children in Sara’s and Jane’s groups made maps that led from their
classroom doors to specific trees which the children have chosen to study. The
children exchanged maps with one another and tried to find their way to the
tree indicated on the map. When children share their maps, we see their efforts
to make sense of the nearby world, their desire to record and share discoveries
and their connections to place: “Here are the steps outside our door,”
“Here’s the sheep pen.”
Educator David Sobel, in his book Mapmaking with Children says maps are a valuable bridge between the real world and the abstract world. “We do a disservice to children when we jump in too quickly at a prematurely abstract level in map reading and mapmaking. ...maps and drawings are representations of things that are emotionally important to children.”
Mapping an area in the woods on school property is a developmentally appropriate approach to mapmaking for these first and second-graders. It’s a beginning and concrete level of mapmaking, and the maps are a representation of something that is emotionally important to the children (their beloved woods that they run around in every day during recess at school). Gradually, we’ll focus on scale, location, direction, and geographic relationships.
Our children follow paths from our classroom doors and use maps to make meaning of their experience. Before we look at map books, it’s important that we develop this “inside-out” approach to mapmaking. Rather than looking at someone else’s shapes and someone else’s facts, we are making meaning through our own shapes and through finding things out for ourselves.
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