Sorry about my absence over the last week! I had a week long Renaissance Place training to attend, followed by the MCPSS SMART Symposium on Saturday (which was AWESOME, by the way). Here are some wonderful activities to help your students with reading maps. There are 3 activities in all: Coordinate Grids (pictures below), Interactive Grid Maps (the city of Saskatoon), and a World Map activity. Hope you find them useful!

Check out GeoGames from reachtheworld.org. There are two activities: Build Planet Earth and Map Countries and Cities. They are both drag-and-drop activities and work great on the SMART Board. Try them out if you are studying North and South Poles, continents, oceans, mountains and rivers. Happy Tuesday!

The Barnaby and Belinda Bear site is a nice interactive website for young children that covers several topics including geography, map skills, life cycles, and more. This site works great on the SMART Board and would be perfect for a Pre-school or Kindergarten classroom. Make sure you visit the teacher section as well. Check it out!

Mapping Our World is an interactive resource from Oxfam.org.uk specifically made for Whiteboards that explores the relationship between maps and globes. There are 3 different lessons with a total of 9 different activities, and each focuses on different skills related to maps, globes, and geography (read here for more specific curriculum information). Review questions for each activity can be found by clicking “Plenary” at the bottom of each activity. Below is the “What on Earth?” interactive from Lesson 1 that lets students look at Earth from an alien’s point of view. Students must then log all the features that can be seen from different distances and angles. What a fantastic resource!