Mapmaking with Children: Sense of Place Education for the Elementary Years

by David Sobel, William Varner (Editor)

The current crisis in geography education has spawned several new books on mapmaking, many of which advocate either recitation and drill or a conceptual top-down model that ignores children's interests. Mapmaking with Children presents an inspired alternative. Maintaining that there is no substitute for hands-on experience, David Sobel places the initial emphasis on local projects--projects that begin in students' own backyards and communities, projects that provide a sense of place. As Sobel explains, "In the beginning, children's maps represent their experiences of beauty, secrecy, adventure, and comfort. With these affective endeavors as a foundation, I then gradually start to focus on scale, location, direction, and geographic relationships. The development of emotional bonds and cognitive skills needs to go hand in hand in my approach to developmentally appropriate social studies and geography." To that end, his book identifies each stage of development, presenting relevant theoretical issues and several appropriate projects. In the beginning, students stay close to home, mapping their known world. Gradually, they move on to their neighborhood, developing a sense of place, scope, and perspective. Eventually, once students are older, they explore the nation, the world, even the solar system, creating raised relief maps and contour maps to develop visual literacy and spatial reasoning skills. Vivid illustrations of the students' work are provided throughout to let you observe each stage of development. Mapmaking, as Sobel uses it, has relevance across the curriculum. In addition to appealing to social studies teachers, this book will be of interest to science teachers, language arts teachers, and math teachers looking for new ways to invigorate the curriculum.

Genres: Geography, Education, Parenting, Nonfiction, Reference, Teaching

176 pages, Paperback

First published May 13, 1998

Reviews

[Bibliobites Veronica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super helpful book for educators wanting to introduce mapmaking to their students. The examples are all from classroom activities, but I’ve been easily able to implement them in my homeschool, with a small group of kids aged 8-13. Really thankful for this resource.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book! It has chapters divided by ages, then fabulous activities described in each chapter.

This is just perfect for my grandkids, I think we shall have Map Mondays and combine these activities with a map subscription I've ordered for them.

I'm thrilled I ordered this book.

[Ardyth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of great ideas here, with quite clear how-to, just be aware it falls to the parent/teacher to plan & prep for when and how to use them... not weeks and weeks of prep work, but not stuff you can wing on five minutes' notice, either.

Most will be difficult, or at least much less enjoyable, with only one child -- they really do need a group of kids to get the energy going.

[Trina Burel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Place-based education is an “new-old” educational theory that proposes to invite children into project- based lessons that are meaningful precisely because they learn the various school subjects through investigating their local environment. Place-based education builds upon children’s familiarity with their immediate landscape and grows outward as the children grow in cognitive understanding for a holistic, global understanding of interconnected systems and topics.


Map-making With Children is a thorough description of the progression from local, concrete narrating and model- building to abstract mapping concepts starting in kindergarten. I wish this was more open-and-go, but the suggested conversation starters for each topic are natural sounding and easy to use straight from the book during a lesson. There is a considerable amount of prep time for introducing children to model making, and creating teacher maps, (which is to be expected) but I am overall pleased about this helpful resource that can be adapted for both school and homeschool use.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dreamy and useful. Lots of ideas both philosophical (developmental scales, skills, etc) and implementations (activities, worksheets, etc).

[Colette · Rating 4 out of 5]

This author has some great suggestions for mapping activities and projects. They sound like fun.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In the beginning, children’s maps represent their experiences of beauty, secrecy, adventure, and comfort. With these affective endeavors as a foundation, I then gradually start to focus on scale, location, direction, and geographic relationships.”

A really nice book about helping young students build conceptual geography knowledge through mapmaking of their firsthand experiences.

“A curriculum based on building a relationship between the structure of the local landscape and the shape of the children’s lives must replace our nonsensical focus on the long ago and faraway.”

This corresponds generally to a broader idea of building initial knowledge through personal experience, or at least teaching rote knowledge that can relate in some way to personal experience (love the dig at teaching the solar system in elementary school, when it doesn’t conceptually mean much to students). There’s also the discussion of how teaching this kind of knowledge alienates students from their local environments by teaching them that “important thing are far away”.

I love maps and always have, and can’t wait to make maps with my kids.

Takeaways:
- Make big maps of small places
- Model making precedes mapmaking
- Honor expanding horizons and differing viewpoints (pictorial, panoramic, aerial) as a child gets older and older

Cool projects:
- Build a 3D classroom model and hide a penny in the classroom in the same place you hide a gold star on the model; have students find the penny and redo; have students add to the model over time
- Make a panoramic drawing of the classroom; have students make their own similar drawings and mark where their desk is; then mix up the drawins and have them guess which desk to sit at
- Show them examples of pictorial, panoramic, and aerial views
- Have students hide their own pennies and draw a treasure map for someone else to find them
- Have students draw a map of their route from home to school, with prompts to help them know what to add
- Make a treasure hunt map for the kids to follow; you could hide puzzle pieces that need to be put together
- Take an existing map and divide it via a grid; have each child enlarge and add details to one section, then put the map back together again
- Make maps of fictional books or enlarge maps that already come with the books

[Betsy Cypress · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finally made it a priority to finish reading this book over Christmas break and it was fantastic. I have a better understanding of the logical progression of children’s geographical understanding and mapmaking skill development.
There are many fantastic ideas for fun activities and projects in here and I am excited to use them with my 5 children in our family’s homeschool over the coming months and years!

[Kyleigh Dunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found this super helpful in fleshing out how to do mapmaking and aspects of physical geography. I've known we should do it as a part of our kids' Charlotte Mason education, but we haven't had a clear plan and so have floundered or been discouraged because I didn't understand what to expect developmentally. Sobel gave lots of practical ideas and progression and it was reassuring to me that what my kids are doing is developmentally appropriate.

[Emily Sablatura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those rare books I will likely check out yearly. It's divided up into what to teach different aged children about Geography and map making. Not only is it useful, but it was a fun read!

[Anna Latimer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent explanation of why young children need to learn to make and read maps.

[Sara Hollar · Rating 4 out of 5]

DNF. Had some wonderful ideas for mapmaking. Written for a school context but worth a flip through!

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book for educators! I enjoyed this book and it gave me inspiration for our homeschool.

[Kaycee Owens · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very helpful read that breaks down mapmaking for children at different ages and stages. He reinforces much of what I already believe about education, especially for the younger years. Rather than focusing on memorization of abstract concepts, a “sense of place” can be fostered through hands-on and community based learning. I gleaned SO much about maps (I already geek out about them in any fictional story I read) and will return to this book again and again for ideas of how to best teach them to my children.

[Jennifer]

Lots of creative project ideas for teaching mapping skills to children. Of particular interest to me were the chapters on the role of children's cognitive development in understanding different types of maps.

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A teacher's aid, for children over 5.

[Whole Terrain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read the Whole Terrain interview of David Sobel about this book.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

exciting to have new ideas in my teacher toolbox for a new school year