Mapping Your Mail: A Fun Geography Project
November 18, 2009 Posted by Painted Hen's Rooster
This week, November 15-21, is Geography Awareness Week. In one way or another, geography touches all of our lives on just about a daily basis. Thanks to incredible technical advances, we now have live maps and GPS on our phones, in our cars…even in some of our video games. But even with all of the geography surrounding us, sometimes it’s tough to think of a simple, easy way to introduce our children to maps and geography. I am a geographer at heart (I work in the Geographic Information Systems industry) and I thought for a while about an easy, non-digital, hands on way to get kids interested in maps and geography. The idea: Mapping Your Mail.
Mapping Your Mail
Every day, you and your kids can make a simple map of where your mail came from and how it got to your home. Here’s how to do it.
Materials
A map of the United States (or whatever country you might reside in)
Pushpins
Colored rubberbands
Corkboard (optional)
- First, mount your map somewhere that you can push pins into it (I’d recommend a cork board)
- Place a pushpin on your hometown.
- Wait for your daily mail to come to your mailbox. Explain to your kids what a return address is on your mail, and place pushpins on the map for each city/state that your mail came from that day.
- Stretch a rubberband from each of the cities your mail came from to your home.
- Lead a discussion about the routes the mail took to get to your home. Questions you can ask might include:
- Which mail traveled the farthest distance?
- Which mail traveled the shortest distance?
- How far did the mail travel? (use the map scale)
- What kinds of landscapes did your mail cross: mountains, lakes, rivers, deserts, etc.?
- How many states did the mail cross to get to your home?
- How fast did the mail travel? (use the postmark and map scale to calculate time and distance)
- What direction did the mail travel?
- What is it like in the city where the mail came from?
Let the discussion expand and see what questions your kids come up with too. And if you have other questions to add to the list or have other ideas on how to get your kids interested in maps and geography, please share them here. We’d love to hear them. If your kids are showing a real interest in maps and geography, here are some additional resources that are really great for kids:
Heather M. says:
November 18th, 2009
What a fun and simple idea. I’m definitely going to try this. I can see my kids running to the mailbox every day to add a new pin to the map! Thanks for the link to My Wonderful World it’s really filled with lots of great ideas.
Richard Rogers says:
November 18th, 2009
Gotta give it up for the Five hens. You ladies really come up with some good ideas and good recipes. Keep up the great work.
I can’t think of a question to add like the ones you have, but maybe for older kids you can ask them to name the capital of the state that the mail is from.
Gerald says:
November 18th, 2009
Here’s another question you can ask: What time zone did the mail come from? or How many time zones did the mail cross? Love this post by the way.
Painted Hen's Rooster says:
November 18th, 2009
Thanks for all of the great questions you’ve added! We did this project with our 6-year old tonight and he loved it. He was really excited to see how many rivers the rubberbands crossed and it led to a great discussion about how rivers form, what the biggest river in the U.S. is, and where all the water goes at the end of a river. I hope you all have similar experiences too. It’s so much fun sharing maps and geography with kids. I guess I’ll always be a Geo-geek!
forex robot says:
December 16th, 2009
Keep posting stuff like this i really like it.
forex robot