Entry 22: Making maps
The week before break, since the kids were going to be crazy either way (they had their musical rehearsals and performance and Valentine’s Day celebrations on top of being excited about break), I decided to implement the hands-on lesson for my innovative social studies unit.
The innovative unit is a requirement for my class: a series of at least 3 lessons around a single topic, taught using inquiry methods. Over the course of the year, I have to do one for each of the main subject areas (literacy, math, social studies and science). So far, I’ve already done the first two and started the third, which means I’ll just have to do the last one (science) in the coming weeks.
For my social studies unit, we’re exploring the changing nature of maps. However, in order to get to that point, the students needed to understand how maps work, so we spent an afternoon making maps of different spaces in the classroom.
The students took this assignment above and beyond anything I could have imagined. While they were required to create a key with their map and to draw it from a bird’s eye view, many of them took measurements to make a map that was to scale, or they added additional labels in order to orient the map more accurately.
As I brought the students back together to end the lesson, C.P. started to get upset. I checked in with him, and he expressed the reason for his demeanor: his map was “wrong”. When I prodded further, I discovered that another student had moved a piece of furniture so that C.P.’s map no longer represented the space accurately. I asked him to bring it to the attention of the group when we all sat for the discussion.
When he brought it up, one of the other students said that “it changed because it’s just a map of our classroom. It’s not like it’s a map of roads or the country” to which a third student (with all the attitude a third grader can muster) responded “those can change too.”
They’re so ready to take this concept to the next level.
