By Todd Erickson, Head Teacher
“When a butterfly looks for a flower, she can use a map.” —Leila (East AM child)
Children possess an abundant desire to make meaning out of their experiences and to understand not only where they are but where they might be heading (literally and figuratively). As the teachers discovered this past year, one way our East AM children created meaning and gained understanding was through making and studying maps. Our exploration across the fall, winter, and spring quarters allowed our classroom community to organize their worlds, exercise their creativity, and begin to think and work symbolically.
East AM teachers noticed in the fall quarter that children were interested in maps of various kinds. Owen and Macklin created street signs, such as “Old Skyline Boulevard,” along with accompanying maps of local roadways and posted them on trees in the classroom’s outdoor space. In the yard, Ellie G. and Juliette drew a map that helped them avoid the busier areas in our classroom. Meanwhile, Kiran and Ari worked on maps in the sand area that charted their paths across the solar system. This wide-ranging, child-driven curiosity inspired the teachers to take a deeper dive into maps. And with that, a classroom project about maps was born. (See the “What is a Project?” sidebar for more information about projects.)
As is often the case with project work, the teachers’ first step was to uncover what the children already knew about maps:
“I know how to make maps go all around the world.” —Sophia
“You go anywhere using maps, you follow the maps.” —Soren
“My mommy and daddy use maps to see where is the treasure.” —Christina
“If you get lost in a car, you could put it [in] and then you could know.” —Diego
“My grandpa has maps, and he uses it to drive.” —Eslan
The teachers regularly introduced paper and various writing implements to invite and inspire children to document their thinking around maps. Soon enough, maps of all shapes and forms found their way to us: maps of children’s homes, maps to find Martha and Cannonball (our rabbits), maps of California, and maps that helped planes fly from Stanford to San Francisco while avoiding snakes. We also added picture books and nonfiction books about maps to our classroom bookshelves. During winter break, the teachers invited children to make a map—of a family trip, their bedrooms, or imaginary lands. Maps emerged as dynamic and immediate expressions of the children’s thoughts, questions, and experiences.
Creativity knows few boundaries in the minds and hearts of young children, as they demonstrated in winter quarter with their maps of the sand area environments they painstakingly and collaboratively hand-crafted. These mapped terrains—sometimes days and even weeks in the making—included mountains (“Frozen Castle Mountains”) and islands (“Watoto Island”) and occasionally featured lightning bolts, a pirate coin, a map store, and, of course, bathrooms. The boat in our outdoor play space was home to oceanic maps that charted courses to China, New York City, and even the sun. These maps also incorporated various obstacles and rewards like alligators and treasure chests. Hollow blocks, found on our patio, sparked the construction of large-scale rocket ships and the design of maps that led to Planet Google and Banana Asteroid. Reality and fantasy became travel partners as the East AM children plotted worlds both seen and unseen.
Winter turned into spring, and as the children’s cognitive powers matured and blossomed through their work with open-ended materials and an endless array of play-fueled activities, their interactions with maps became more representative. Children possess a keen ability to live in the moment, bolstered by daily hands-on, concrete experiences. In our classroom, the children wondered about their immediate surroundings, including their school and their individual paths to get there.
During one week in March, they were invited to represent their morning travels from home to Bing. On the map, our young people passed fire stations, other schools, and lots of houses as they made their way to East AM. Some children remembered the names of the streets they used to reach Bing, while others used highways to arrive at their destination. Each of these graphic representations served as a symbol for a concrete object along a path. The process of symbolic representation was not only a learning exercise for these nascent mapmakers, but it also planted the seeds for further symbolic thinking, where the symbols known more commonly as letters and numbers become prominent in the educational process. One of the powerful undercurrents of our maps project was the children’s repeated experiences with symbolic thinking, where the drawing of a triangle can represent a mountain, a line can symbolize a road, and a green circle can stand for a turtle.
Play offers children some semblance of control and power. For young people whose lives are often largely managed by adults, gaining a measure of agency and autonomy is both rewarding and necessary. The maps project provided opportunities for the children to develop a sense of self-determination, expertise, and order, as their understanding of their inner and outer worlds grew with each line or symbol added to their maps.