Challenge your mapping skills! Interpret a map by plotting a trip. Have a classmate try to figure out your destination!

• 1.

  Divide into small groups. Each group needs a map of your community or even another part of the world that you have studied. Decide where you will travel from and to.

• 2.

  On an individual dry-erase board, draw the major routes needed to take you there with Crayola Dry-Erase Markers. Pay particular attention to turns.

• 3.

  Think about landmarks you pass on the way. Draw them (or symbols of them) on your map. These are clues for your classmates.

• 4.

  Take turns figuring out the beginning and ending destinations for each other’s directions.

Standards

• LA: Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions with diverse partners on grade 3 topics and texts, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly.
• LA: Report on a topic or text, tell a story, or recount an experience with appropriate facts and relevant, descriptive details, speaking clearly at an understandable pace.
• MATH: Generate measurement data by measuring lengths using rulers marked with halves and fourths of an inch.
• SS: Locate and distinguish among varying landforms and geographic features, such as mountains, plateaus, islands, and oceans.
• VA: Use different media, techniques, and processes to communicate ideas, experiences, and stories.
• VA: Use visual structures of art to communicate ideas.

Adaptations

• Students create a map of their school building. Include all "landmarks" but no room numbers. Write directions for a classmate to follow and provide the map. Is your classmate successful in finding your secret location?
• Students create a map using only landmarks. This strategy is especially helpful when the destination is another country.