Can you identify a state or country from its outline? Are you able to fit the states or provinces of your country together? Try it outdoors—on a giant, colorful map!

• 1.

  What is your state or country’s shape? Does it have a distinctive border or an unusual shoreline? Do you know where key areas are located? Can you identify where you live?

• 2.

  Ask your teacher to help you find a safe, large area outside to draw your map. Start by drawing your state or other area that you are studying with Crayola Giant Sidewalk Chalk. Fill the space with color.

• 3.

  Ask a classmate to draw and color a bordering geographic area with a different color.

• 4.

  Continue mapping and filling the regions with color. See how much of the country or world you can draw from memory. Look at an atlas to check on details.

• 5.

  Can your classmates identify the geographic area you created? Add visual clues or words if necessary until they figure out what you drew.

Standards

• LA: Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers.
• LA: Use information gained from illustrations (e.g., maps, photographs) and the words in a text to demonstrate understanding of the text.
• LA: Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade 3 topics and texts, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly.
• LA: Participate in shared research and writing projects.
• SS: Use appropriate resources, data sources, and geographic tools to generate, manipulate, and interpret information.
• 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

• Possible classroom resources include: A Child's Introduction to the World: Geography, Cultures, and People - From the Grand Canyon to the Great Wall of China by Heather Alexander; Geography from A to Z: A Picture Glossary by Jack Knowlton; A Child's Geography Explore His Earth by Ann Voskamp
• Encourage students to research the capital of each country, state, province. Additionally, students investigate the major landforms that are located in the geographic area. In addition to the name of the landform, students include information such as the level above or below sea level, etc.
• Why are countries, states, provinces shaped the way they are? Students investigate how borders were created.