It’s the 3-day countdown until the giant Floor Map of Canada arrives from Canadian Geographic. How big you ask? 10.7 m x 7.9 m (or approximately 35′ x 26′). Check out the Canadian Geographic overview here.
For two weeks I will be the keeper and driver and deliver of the map. My friends who have had a giant map experience before say that it is HEAVY, and appropriately for a map of Canada, comes in a wheeled hockey bag.
For the past few weeks, I have been working on choosing and creating content to match with different grades and different curricula. I’m hoping that this won’t just be a Social Studies experience, (because it IS a map), but that teachers will take up my offer to connect the map to other subjects like math (scale, angles, directions, etc.), Language Arts (prepositions, adverbs, etc; storytelling….)
As this is another one of those “Trying Something New” experiences, I will likely feel compelled to blog about it. So, in the next few weeks, look forward to some pictures and updates in this space.
At this point, it feels like there might be lots of iterations in my lesson plans! I’ve ordered a “political” map that shows all 338 federal electoral districts, partly because it also had good geographical features and political boundaries. And just to mix things up and try to offer diverse experiences, I am pulling and modifying lesson ideas from three other entirely different maps. And creating some ideas from scratch!
Never a dull moment. But, it has been a while since I have stretched the Social Studies region of my brain!
What I learned today... 