Draw a bird’s-eye view of neighborhood streets! Map the way from home to school.

• 1.

  Pretend you are a bird or in an airplane looking down on the street where you live or go to school. What do you see? Houses? Apartment roofs? Stores? Intersections? Join an adult or your teacher in a walk or bike ride around your neighborhood. Talk about the street signs and buildings you see. Then draw your own map.

• 2.

  Use Crayola® Erasable Colored Pencils and a straight edge to draw your street. Add streets and intersections close to your home. Which ones do you travel on the way to school?

• 3.

  Draw the building where you live with Crayola Twistables. What would a bird see? Add details such as a swing set, fence, pets, steps, or patio.

• 4.

  Color in other buildings. Add details such as cars, stop signs, street lights, or people.

• 5.

  Identify your house and label the streets on your map. If friends used your map, could they find their way around?

Standards

• LA: Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas and information clearly.
• LA: Report on a topic in an organized manner, using appropriate facts and relevant, descriptive details to support main ideas or themes; speak clearly at an understandable pace.
• MATH: Know relative sizes of measurement units within one system of units.
• MATH: Draw points, lines, line segments, rays, angles (right, acute, obtuse), and perpendicular and parallel lines. Identify these in two-dimensional figures.
• SS: Use appropriate resources, data resources, and geographic tools to generate, manipulate, and interpret information.
• SS: Estimate distance.
• VA: Select and use the qualities of structures and functions of art to improve communication of their ideas.
• VA: Describe ways in which the principles and subject matter of other disciplines taught in the school are interrelated with the visual arts.

Adaptations

• In small groups, students can begin the mapping activity with creating a group map of their school. Encourage discussion of how to get to a particular location in the school and use of directional terms in the discussion. Student groups select an undisclosed location and write directions for classmates to follow in finding their chosen location.
• Students make use of their geometric knowledge to construct their maps, including angle types. Students compose written directions to accompany their maps. Students use appropriate directional comments such as "north", "south", "east", and "west."
• Students build a 3-D model of their school, home, or other significant building in their lives. Students write directions to travel from this location to a central building in their town.