I am teaching a geography unit for fifth graders. Part of the unit is meant to address students’ lack of map skills. I have chosen to begin by having the students design their own country/nation, complete with borders, cities, towns, capitals, and various types of landforms. Rather than doing a simple pencil sketch, which usually yields a quick and sloppy rendering, the students will create their maps using the Microsoft Paint program. With this program they can refine details, correct mistakes without unsightly erasure marks, and render the map in color, which should result in a map that closely resembles maps they routinely encounter in their text books. Once a satisfactory design has been completed, it will be saved on the school’s hard drive. The file can then be imported into Microsoft Word as a Printed Watermark (from the Background section in the Format drop-down menu). Once the map is present as the background, the students can type the names of their cities, towns, countries, etc., simply by placing their cursor over the appropriate spot and typing it in. They may also use the Table menu to draw a map key, and perhaps even a grid, upon which they can place coordinates or measures of latitudes and longitudes. The original file can be kept and modified to produce other types of maps that they need knowledge of, including product, road, elevation, political, and historical.
Having created their own maps, and using the some of the same techniques used in modern cartography, it is hoped that students will have an expanded understanding of how to read and decipher maps they will be exposed to later in both school and in the real world.
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Geography Literature Connection
In the book, "The Scrambled States of America" written and illustrated by Laurie Keller, Kansas is fed up with being stuck in the middle of the country and never able to meet any other new states. To solve the problem, he and his neighbors throw a party to which all 50 states are invited. To continue this idea, I will enroll my class in www.world-pen-pals.com, a site in which, as the title suggests, you can select pen pals in another country for your students (and yourself). As this is a social studies activity, the friendly letter writing activities will be begin with my students sharing information about the weather and geography of North Carolina, and request similar information from their pen pals. Letter writing can continue with topics that run the entire gamut of social studies instruction, from all five themes of geography to the makeup of their friends' citizenry and government.
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