Understanding the big picture - A Map inquiry

"Teaching is more than imparting knowledge, it is inspiring change. Learning is more than absorbing facts, it is acquiring understanding."  - William Arthur Ward

As children grow, they gradually start spending more time in making sense of the world around them. They try to understand the place they live in, their neighborhood etc.

A couple of months back the twins started reciting the continent song learnt at school more often. They were truly inspired by Asia and Europe Immersion days celebrated at school. They drew flags of few countries they learnt about and re-enacted their cultural lesson experience at school.

Slowly they started inquiring about the continent they are living in. "Mom, We are in North America!", exclaimed Nidhi almost everyday. "Our grandparents are in Asia". "Do we know anyone living in Africa or South America?"

On a trip to ToysRUs, Nidhi insisted on buying a globe for them and we got one. (I know, we are officially a nerd family :P) This opened doors to lot of learning!

They started to recognize a number of countries and continents. They also started to take lessons on Geography at school. Frequently they would sit with the globe and discuss the continents and how they can fly from one continent to other to visit their extended family. This got them interested in maps.

They also started to inquire about the map of our community on their way to the park everyday.
"Where are we now?", "Where is our house?", "How do we get to our house from here?" were the questions asked almost everyday.

"Where are we in this map, dad?"

I realized they are trying to make sense of their place in the world. What a good opportunity to teach them our address needed for emergency purposes!

We started with reading the following books
Me on the map by Joan Sweeney
There is a map in my lap! - Dr.Suess
Beginner's World Atlas by National Geographic Kids

The book "Me on the map" was a great book to help them understand the concepts of continent, country, state, city and street. It also helped them understand how maps are drawn. They also observed that there are many kinds of maps and started to draw maps of their room and house.

They raised some interesting questions.
"I don't see the park in our apartment community map. If park is to be shown where will it be?" - Sid
"Why is the store not shown in our community map?" - Nidhi
"If our patio faces west as you say which direction is our living room?" - Nidhi


We started to spend time studying maps of National parks and farms that we visited. The twins started to express their understanding of spatial relations and maps in ways they felt most comfortable. This step of self documenting their learning is a significant step in their inquiry based learning journey. I am happy at the fact that the kids are taking ownership of their learning and documenting their understanding.

Here are some of their maps. Notice the addition of finer details in later documents compared to very primitive ones of their earlier documents. This shows how their learning has evolved over time.

Representation of a town - Initial version by Sid

"This is a town with buildings and a river" - Sid.

Representation of town with blocks - Recent version by Sid

"This is a town. This is our house. Here is the temple. This is the road. We go up on mountains to go to temple." - Sid

Map of our house - Initial version by Nidhi

"This is our house. That is my bed in my room. Each of us are in a room." - Nidhi

Map of our house - Recent version by Nidhi

"This is a house with door and door knob. This purple is the stairs. Our bedrooms are upstairs. Above that is the window." - Nidhi

Map of our neighborhood park - Sid

"This is our park. There is a slide and spiral climbing pole. There is a bench. Mom and dad are looking at us." - Sid

A city map with roads - Sid

"This is a city. Here is our house. That is our uncle's house. We go through this road to reach our uncle's house." - Sid. 

Me: Why do you have roads in your map?

Sid : There are lots of trees and lots of houses. We can go to the houses through the road on car.

Map of our apartment community - Nidhi

"This is our building. There is clubhouse, our house, fountain and other buildings. This striped area is our street." - Nidhi

Till now their map keys and legends have mostly been oral. They describe the map as they draw. To assess their understanding of reading a map, I queried "Where is block D?" pointing to our community map. "Here it is!" , came an enthusiastic reply from Sid. "How do you know it is block D?", "Because it is shown here- Orange color is block D" replies Nidhi pointing to the map legend.

It has been interesting to see how the inquiry unfolded and also amazed to see how much the twins' documenting their learning has improved! I hope to keep this post updated as the inquiry progresses.