Teacher's Guide
Introduction
About the Poster
What's Included in the Lessons?
Teaching methodology
Summary of the five geographic concepts
Introduction
The teaching poster and map packet pages with four accompanying lessons is appropriate for upper elementary and junior high school classes. The purpose of this teaching package is to help students understand and use maps. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has provided this package as a service to educators so that more Americans will learn to understand the world of information on maps. Everything in this package teaches and reinforces geographic skills that are required in your curriculum.
This is a flexible resource unit. Included in this package are:
- A teaching poster information
- Step-by-step lesson plans for four geography and map reading lessons:
Lesson 1 - Introduction to Maps (2, 30-minute sessions)
Lesson 2 - Some things You Need to Know to Read a Map (2, 30-minute sessions)
Lesson 3 - What You Can Learn from a Map (2, 30-minute sessions)
Lesson 4 - Reading a Topographic Map (3, 35-minute sessions)
- Three reproducible maps from which you'll create a map packet for each student
- Reproducible activity sheets—one for each lesson
- A summary of the five geographic concepts as articulated by Guidelines for Geographic Education, Elementary and Secondary Schools, a publication of the Joint Committee on Geographic Education of the National Council for Geographic Education and the Association of American Geographers
- Basic information about the USGS
About the poster
The poster section pages in this teaching package shows several views of the same place—Salt Lake City, Utah. It includes a large aerial view of the city with the mountains in the background. This is where our students begin—with the reality of a picture of a place.
The poster section pages also shows some symbolic representations—maps and a digital elevation model—of the same area. This will help your students move from the concrete picture in the photo to the symbolic representation of a map. This is the most basic and necessary skill in helping students understand and use maps.
No map is meaningful if the viewer can't connect the symbols on the map to the reality of a place. For students in this age group, moving from reality to symbols is a major intellectual step and a critical part of the learning process.
Also, by showing these different maps of the same place, the poster pages clearly illustrates the decision-making process that goes into mapmaking.
A key teaching point is that there can be many different kinds of maps for the same place. It's not possible to show everything about a place on one map and still make it understandable and easy to read. So mapmakers have developed many different kinds of maps.
As students work with the poster section pages, they will learn that the map they choose to work with depends on the kind of information they need.
Another key teaching point is that the legend is the key to the map. To understand the purpose of a particular map, students need to know how to read the legend. To make the point very clear, each map in the poster section pages has an enlarged legend.
What's included in the lessons?
Each lesson contains step-by-step lesson plans, and "hands-on" student activity sheets, that incorporate information about maps into existing curriculum objectives in geography and social studies.
- Lesson 1 helps students think about maps they have seen and are familiar with. Then the lesson introduces them to the picture and maps in the teaching poster section pages.
- Lesson 2 provides some basic information students need to know to read maps: direction, latitude and longitude, and scale.
- Lesson 3 helps students realize that different maps can highlight different characteristics of a particular location. The legend is the key to unlocking the secrets of a map.
- Lesson 4 is about topographic maps. It helps students understand how a two-dimensional map can represent a three-dimensional surface.
This teacher's package also includes a map packet—reproducible masters of the maps shown in the poster section pages. Before teaching the first lesson, make a copy of each of the maps for your students. The map packet will be used in several of the lessons.
Teaching methodology
Suggested in this teaching package are a number of different inquiry strategies you can use with students. This type of teaching is particularly appropriate in the social studies. Students will be asked to look at the data presented on the maps and draw some conclusions. In some cases, they will need to use data from more than one map to find the answers.
This helps them develop higher order thinking skills by manipulating data in several maps to make comparisons between them. Lesson plans use a variety of strategies that appeal to different learning styles. The teachers' guide for each lesson shows you how the information relates to the five key geographic concepts.
