Five-year-old Amelia—our budding cartographer—has captured the attention of every child in the room as she shares her latest map drawing: “You walk out of my front door and turn right. Then you go this way and you are at my swings and slide. If you walk out of my front door, turn left and walk past my wagon, you will be at my gardens, the fire pit and the wood pile!”

We have been reading some really great books about maps recently, which have inspired a lot of creative thinking and map drawings.

When children create and play with maps, they’re learning math without even realizing it. Using maps helps children learn about distance and concepts like near, far and next to. Children begin to figure out how objects relate to other objects, such as where they are in space and how far apart they are. Later, the children will use numbers to measure distances and angles. But, for now, they’re just starting to understand these concepts.

Preschool children, in particular, are very curious about how things are positioned and where they are in relation to each other. Whether they’re building with blocks, modeling with clay, or setting the table in the play kitchen, they are exploring space.

The more often early learners play with maps, the better they’ll understand space when it’s time to learn about geometry. Reading physical maps may be a lost art, but it’s a fun and important skill to tackle nonetheless.

Our brains can reason, create, analyze, and process information all day long. They also enable us to move around in our environment with an innate sense of direction. This skill is called spatial orientation, and it’s like having an internal GPS system in our brains.

Spatial orientation helps us understand our relationship to the world we live in as it helps us navigate through space.

Children are natural explorers. They come into the world ready to experiment, investigate, and learn through play. As they engage in this process of exploration and discovery, they not only change the structure of their brains but strengthen the skills they need to be engaged, flexible learners throughout their lives.

“I made the path that Sam follows,” shares three-year-old Michaela. “Remember how Sam does all those curves?”

Sam is a cat in Joyce Hesselberth’s delightful book Mapping Sam, which follows the path of a cat as he travels through his neighborhood. There’s a lot going on in Michaela’s map, but it all makes perfect sense when she explains it to her friends. Michaela’s drawing skills are still developing, but her spatial reasoning as she shows us the path is remarkable. 

Some of our favorite mapping books are also wordless. Museum Trip by Barbara Lehman is a wonderful picture book about maps and mazes. I love books without words because they slow us all down to concentrate on the pictures rather than language—and we all see things a bit differently. It is interesting to see how books without words seem to level the playing field. Regardless of our age or reading ability, we are all equal.

Try introducing young children to simple maps of familiar places such as their classroom or playground. Talk about where objects are located on the map and how they’re connected. This will help the children understand the concepts of distance and direction.

As the children become more proficient at mapping, you can make your map activities more challenging. For example, you might create treasure maps together and hide a toy somewhere in the classroom or outdoor playground. The children can use their emerging navigational skills to follow the map and find the treasure!

Research shows that children who have a deep understanding of spatial relationships are more likely to succeed in STEM fields. So keep encouraging them to explore and play with spatial concepts—it’s helping them build important math skills!

For more real-life applications, whenever you are traveling along a familiar route, narrate the directions out loud. For example, in the car, you can say: “At this corner with the fire hydrant, we turn right! At the next stop sign, we turn left and we will see the grocery store.”

I often narrate directions when the children in our program walk to the local park (see photo above): “Climb the stairs and then turn right and follow the sidewalk past the mailbox to the park.”

Wishing you many happy early “map” adventures!

The second step of our project was to represent the building that was sketched and seen on our neighborhood walk. Children used table blocks to represent these buildings. Table blocks were chosen because we thought they would be easy to manipulate and were smaller than unit blocks so they would be able to represent what their vision was on a smaller scale. We encouraged children to talk about their sketch as they were building. When they were done we put the sketch next to their structures and children were able to point out specific details that they included in their sketch such as the number of bricks on the side of the building and the placement of windows, the height of the building with the placement of the windows and the arches located as a feature above the stairs of a building with the number of antennas on top of the roof. We were able to see the beginning of concepts such as quantity, height, the recognizing of other shapes and spatial awareness and we were excited!

We wanted children to keep working with different open-ended materials and have more opportunities to use the neighborhood as a reference so our next step included just that. For the third step of the project, children had the opportunity to go on a neighborhood walk once again, but this time to look at the different types of buildings in the neighborhood. Before going on the walk, the whole class met as a group and we talked about the different types of buildings and what their purpose was in the neighborhood

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We made a list (grocery store, doctor’s office, library, restaurants) and went on a search for these buildings. Once we were outside and the buildings were spotted, children took pictures of them to take inside and discuss further. Once inside, children represented these buildings using Legos. While putting their structure together, children pointed out specific details of their building and were very eager to try to match their structure to the building that they chose.

They were concentrating on the placement of things not just on the outside such as windows or doors, but the inside such as labeling the doctor’s office that was on the second floor of a building while the pharmacy was on the first floor of that same building. They were also labeling things such as the number of windows, concentrating on the size of the building and being aware that a corner building took over two blocks not just one.

That same eagerness to match details from one “source” to the next continued on to the next step. After building with Legos, children sketched the same building in the neighborhood using colored pencils. I was very impressed with the work the children were doing. It was in this step that we started to see the creativity and the keen eye that each child had regarding their drawings and their structures. We started to see self-correction, two drawings of the same thing building but the focus was on completely different things, and even a three dimensionality that was staring to form within the children’s work.

We also noticed the importance of choosing different materials to represent these buildings. Building with Legos was limiting in how the children could represent their building since they can only snap together in specific ways, but once they were able to draw using colored pencils, we saw the details that were omitted or simply not as obvious in the Lego structures.

We were very pleased with how the building project was going and how open the children were to work with the materials that were given to them for these specific activities. In the next blog, there will be a shift from children working with the buildings in a concrete manner to an abstract manner and using materials that will allow this.

The possibility of a building project began by following children’s interests and things they noticed and pointed out during walks around the neighborhood. This included different types of buildings and specific details of these buildings such as the number of windows, stairs, a triangular roof versus a flat roof, arches, etc. Children were then taking this interest to the classroom by talking about these things and comparing their own houses and buildings that they lived in to the buildings that they saw on their walks. This interest in buildings was also represented in their daily play in things such as their journals, play dough, magnatiles, Legos, their block play, and even pretend play when they were pretending to be construction workers and “building a building from scratch” using large hollow blocks.

After discussing this with my teaching team and exploring the possibilities for math learning in this project, we decided to plan a building project using open-ended materials and breaking it down into ten sequential steps where each step was needed in order for the next step to happen. This project would also start with activities that were simple and straight forward and become a little more complex with each step. We knew that it would be a lot of work, but we were excited and committed to work together to make it happen!

The first step in our project was to go on a neighborhood walk with clipboards, card-stock and pencils. Children were invited to sketch a building of their choice and concentrate on a specific detail such as number of windows, stairs, roof, etc.

They had the opportunity to review their sketch with me and talk about the specific details in their sketch. This was a great opportunity me to work one on one with the child and model and encourage math language in their description of their building. We also discussed other possible concepts in their sketch such as quantity (number of windows and stairs), size (height and width), spatial awareness (positional words indicating location, direction and distance). The idea was not to have a perfect drawing, but for the child to be able to describe what they saw and what they drew.

In the next few blogs, I will talk about the rest of the steps of our building project and how the children were able to incorporate math at a basic level and reach a more complex level within their exploration of buildings.