Bookmaking With Kids

I happened to be on hand last Thursday when my 6-year-old niece was doing her homework, a mapping worksheet titled Where Are You?. And although she was eager to finish and go play with her grand-
mother’s cat, she suc-
cumbed to the imagina-
tive pleasures that maps so often inspire and de-
toured into a mapmaking adventure of her own.

Just as she was finishing, I asked where she would go if she were to make up her own map. Replying “Oh that’s easy,” she turned over the worksheet and began drawing a grid of her own. Like the worksheet grid, hers included a pet shop, a zoo, a park and her home, but personalized. “My chimney looks like this,” she explained. Her grid also provided scope for wishful thinking: a water-slide park (in the upper righthand corner) and an ice-cream parlor (lower righthand corner).

Most important, the map quest she concocted for herself reflected the heartfelt campaign she is waging with my brother and sister-in-law: Get a cat. So Step #1 takes the shortest route to the pet store:

Start at home. Go 3 blocks N. Buy 2 cats.

In Step #2, she treats her new pets to an outing:

Go 3 blocks E. Go 1 block S and 2 blocks W.

This puts the trio at the zoo, for Step #3:

Look at the tigers.

It was her intention, I think, to conclude with one more set of directions and so treat the cats to ice cream cones. But her grandmother’s cat, a real cat, made an appearance at that point, and off my niece went.

The moral of the story: Give kids a personal stake and they’ll take a mile.

NOTE: I was interested to see a 6-year-old using abbreviations, N for north, etc. Do kids have an instinct for shorthand? Do they naturally transfer the use of abbreviations from one context (such as writing the date as 4-29-2010) to another?

Click the link to see the original homework assignment. (more…)

Recognize these images?

They’re 1st graders’ visions of the Milky Way, the final drawing in their Me on the Map books and a resounding stamp of originality in a project that introduced them to maps. This post, the last in a series, shows what Debra’s students did with preprinted maps in handmade books that were otherwise lush with original artwork. I see more than cutting, pasting and wild coloring in the pages below. I see kids spending time with new images and the new information they convey and, with a fistful of crayons, taking the first steps to making it familiar.

Kudos to Debra and her 2009-2010 class at Lawton Alternative!

Click each picture to see an enlargement. And click here to see all the posts in the Me on the Map series.

Stick-figure self-portraits by Debra’s 1st graders occupied the biggest part of their Me on the Map books because kids believe they are, after all, the cen-
ter of their own universe! After that first spread, the kids combined original artwork and cut-out maps. There’s one page apiece for their home, their city and their state. A map of the United States and another of the North American continent share Page 6. And a world map occupies the last page, along the kids’ drawings of the Milky Way.

Today’s post showcases the books’ second spread, with drawings of their homes—some showing the city’s legendary hills!—and a map of San Francisco. Click each photo for an enlargement. Click here to see all the posts in the Me on the Map series.

Joan Sweeney’s book Me on the Map is standard fare in San Francisco classrooms and I usually propose a basic single-sheet booklet to teachers who want their kids to put some creative energy into their map unit. You can see some examples here and here.

But my friend Debra was hankering for something more. Could we somehow combine the basic book with the pop-up map project recently featured on Bookmaking With Kids, she asked? It took a little tinkering, but the answer was, Yes!

My new Me on the Map project features a stick-figure kid on the first spread, holding a map that pops out and folds up when the book is opened or closed. Debra’s 1st graders LOVED making the pop-ups, personalizing the figures and adding comments in speech balloons. Here’s a look at some of those first spreads. (And please, keep reading for downloads and directions.)

Each book is made from a preprinted tabloid sheet of paper (click here for the template), folded into a basic book (click here for directions), with a box pop-up (click here for instructions) cut into the structure’s first valley fold.

I spent an hour helping the kids fold the basic structure, number the pages, cut the pop-up and glue on a snippet of a map showing their school’s location. Over the next two weeks, during “station” time, they created the rest of the pages using outline maps that I supplied. I’ll show the subsequent pages of these books in later posts.

Click here to see all the posts in the Me on the Map series.

A box pop-up is one of the easiest for kids to make, and the variations are endless. Here are a few of the possibilities. My colleague Susie recently taught the ABC pop-up (top left) to kindergartners; click here for more info. My friend Debra uses the version at the right every year as a book-report project with her 1st graders. And the model at bottom left is one that I use when I teach map-reading.

The ever-inventive Susie recently made a huge improvement on my map-reading version. By adding pre-printed covers and sketching in some additional lines, she made it much easier for kids to tackle. Click each of the photos below for enlargements.

You can download a PDF template by clicking here. Now click the link for step-by-step instructions: (more…)

Two weeks later, and I’m still thinking about maps! And I realized that in my maps post I had forgotten to share some pictures, quota-
tions and resources that I’ve been stockpil-
ing. So here goes.

The goofy pictures are reminders for your students that map-making and map-reading are fun. Click on each of them to find out who made them.

Resources
Frank Jacobs’ Strange Maps blog makes fun and informative reading. Many of its entries will soon appear in book form as Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities. Click here to read an enthusiastic online review from The New Yorker magazine’s Book Bench blog.

More straightforward and useful for the classroom, the Free Printable Maps blog is a terrific resource. Just a few clicks and you can supply your students with maps of the California gold rush, the state’s major earthquakes, its 21 missions, and lots more.

The Atlas of California from Humboldt State University is an appealing tool for kids in 4th/5th grade and up, with a wealth of interactive and animated features for physical, cultural and historical maps.

Quotable Quote
And now, food for thought from author Michael Chabon:

“Childhood is a branch of cartography. Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That’s because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life.

“This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.”

(His entire essay appeared here in the July 16th issue of The New York Review of Books.)