Imagine

We read the book  Mapping Penny’s World  by Loreen Leedy in which a child draws a map of their bedroom. We toyed with the idea of having the class draw pictures of their bedrooms, but wanted to have a visual at the time they were drawing as a reference. After reading another book,   As the Crow Flies  by Gail Hartman that showed a map from a flying crows perspective, we decided to go to the highest point on our playground (on top of our slide) to get a visual as if we were a bird in flight. After climbing to the top we asked the question, “If someone wanted to see what our playground looked like, could you draw them a map?” We started by taking a good look at the shape of the grounds. We noticed our playground is rectangle shaped, the same as the paper we were using to sketch on. While drawing we used the corners of our paper to mirror the corners of the playground. We pointed out identifying features (the snack tables, the big tree, the “boat”) to draw first an...

      House, street, neighborhood, town, state, county, continent and planet are some of the concepts we have been reading and talking about. It’s a lot for little ones to wrap their minds around. We began talking about these concepts by starting small, with their houses. From there, we discussed our street and neighborhoods. We realized that we don’t all live in the same neighborhood and our town has many neighborhoods. Our town doesn’t just have places to live, it also has places and things that we need and all share.  We asked the children, “what are some of the places in our town?” We got so many answers! There were answers like the fire station, the library, restaurants, parks and places to buy groceries. We started drawing our houses and from there our town grew. Our friends got excited to draw some of the place we all share in our town. The roads and street signs came next because the roads help us get around our town. Some of our friends saw a need for trees ...

      Before spring break, we were talking about insect homes. Upon our return from vacation, we started talking about where humans live. We asked the question, “why do we live in houses?” Our friends had a lot of really great answers, “we need to be safe from raccoons”, “when it’s winter it is too cold and we have to go inside”, “we don’t want to get rain on us”.  We asked what are the things that all houses have? We gathered all the answers, “roofs,walls,doors,windows”, and went on to talk about the usefulness of these things. We set up an invitation to build a house with small blocks. One of our friends built their own house. He said, “my house is a long house, it has a hallway that goes to my room”. The houses were all so creative and different. Some included yards with houses for their dogs and grandparents as well. I guess you might say an entire family compound!  We spent time talking about the shapes of doors and windows. We noticed that most roofs slant...